Zachary is joined by Melanie Irvin, Counsel at Branch Insurance, a new and quickly-growing insurance company based in Columbus, Ohio.
In part one of their discussion, Melanie shares the career path that led her to heading up the legal department at Branch. She highlights how Branch is improving the insurance industry, making it accessible to more people, including more efficient underwriting and enhanced customer experience technology.
Visit our website for information about our legal services related to emerging technologies.
Zachary is joined by Melanie Irvin, Counsel at Branch Insurance, a new and quickly-growing insurance company based in Columbus, Ohio.
In part one of their discussion, Melanie shares the career path that led her to heading up the legal department at Branch. She highlights how Branch is improving the insurance industry, making it accessible to more people, including more efficient underwriting and enhanced customer experience technology.
Visit our website for information about our legal services related to emerging technologies.
ZBP - Zachary B. Pyers, Esq.
MI Melanie Irvin, Esq., Branch Insurance
ZBP
We’re here today to talk with Melanie Irvin from Branch Insurance, which is an insurance company located here in Columbus, Ohio. Branch is a relatively new insurance company in the historied insurance companies of Columbus, so we’re excited to talk today to Melanie about not only what Branch is doing but also her role as the counsel for Branch Insurance. Now, Melanie, you and I kind of spoke earlier, and I understand that your official title is “Counsel,” but you’re really serving as kind of the General Counsel for Branch Insurance. Is that right?
MI
Yes, that’s right.
ZBP
Okay, so we’re excited to have you kind of explaining to us all about Branch and how you ended up there. If you could, just give us a little bit of background about yourself before we jump into Branch. Tell me about your earlier career, and then how did you end up at Branch?
MI
Yeah, sure, Zach, and thanks for having me. I really appreciate it. You might not believe this, but I did not grow up dreaming of being an insurance lawyer. I graduated law school in 2008, which was in the midst of the financial crisis, and I did not have any big firm jobs lined up. I was fortunate enough to work for the City of Garfield Heights near Cleveland in the Law Department all during law school, and the Law Director at the time, Dave Mack, let me pretty much work full time, and he was a great mentor to me in terms of not jumping at just any job opportunity. I ended up getting referred to my first law firm job, which was at a mid-sized insurance defense-type firm not unlike Reminger up in Cleveland, Ohio to do insurance coverage work, and I did that at a couple of firms in Cleveland for almost nine years before making the move in-house to handle high-exposure trucking claims and maybe a few coverage and bad faith claims here and there at National Interstate Insurance.
ZBP
And tell us what drew you to Branch Insurance.
MI
I’ll have to back up to when I was working at National Interstate. I had the good luck of working under Charlie Wendland, who is now Head of Claims at Branch, and a couple years before I joined Branch, Charlie had introduced me to the Branch co-founder and CEO, Steve Lekas, and I remember being really impressed by what he was trying to do, but honestly I thought he was a little nuts for trying to build an insurance company from scratch, having worked for carriers in one capacity or another for several years, I understood the regulatory complexity of starting an insurance company from scratch. But fast forward to just shortly after Charlie left for Branch, I met with Steve and he told me he needed someone to help structure and get the insurance entity licensed, so I knew I would be way out of my comfort zone, and I was frankly quite terrified, but I believe so much in the Branch mission and in the small team that Steve had already built that it was a pretty easy decision.
ZBP
I think you’ve already alluded to some of the regulatory issues you knew you were going to be facing just from the start-up before you even joined Branch. Tell us about your role as Counsel for Branch and what kind of falls under your responsibilities and how are you handling or what are you doing in that regard.
MI
It’s a little bit of everything. Every day I learn new things that fall under my purview as Counsel. Steve often tells me that he wasn’t quite sure what I would do after we got Branch Insurance Exchange, which is our insurance entity, licensed, but I have quickly realized that there are just so many needs of a young quickly-growing insurance company, so I basically serve as a resource for the rest of the company - HR compliance, helping build out our employment policies and benefits and helping the product team navigate the ever-changing state by state regulatory requirements. I also help our agency and business development partners with contract negotiation and drafting, and I have been helping expand our insurance entity to the additional states, which requires legal research, a lot of paperwork and communicating with state insurance departments all across the country.
ZBP
I know we’ll talk a little bit more about Branch in a minute, but Branch is outside, I mean they’re not just writing policies here in Ohio, they’re writing in other states, too?
MI
Yes, that’s correct. To take a step back, before we built the insurance entity, Branch was selling insurance as a licensed agent and a program administrator for another insurance company, so we started off selling our products in about five different states, and then once we had our insurance entity licensed in Ohio, we began the process of expanding that to our original five states and then several others, so right now we’re currently licensed and selling on our own paper, as you may say, in about three or four states. I lose track because we keep launching new states. Today we’re actually launching Wisconsin this morning.
ZBP
That’s very exciting. One of the things that I think that you and I had talked about previous to this is that you’re kind of, in your world, working with the founder and starting the company from scratch, coming on as the general counsel, you’re kind of building out the Corporate Legal Department yourself. Tell me what that looks like. From a lawyer’s perspective, what does that look like as you kind of start from scratch and get to build your own department. How does that work and what are some of the things you’re facing, and just what does it look like?
MI
Up until recently, I was a Legal Department of one. As a start-up, we are super scrappy. We try to do as much as we can. We have limited resources. I would have loved to have a whole team of lawyers on Day One, but we just didn’t have the budget to do so. I just recently hired a non-lawyer Manager of Regulatory Affairs. He has taken the lead on our regulatory strategy and relationships, and that frees me up to do a lot of the day to day legal stuff. I also recently hired an incoming 2L as a legal intern, so the three of us right now make up the Branch in-house Legal Department. I plan to add another lawyer towards the end of the year, and then I will just continue to build the team as the rest of our team grows. While there’s so much more I wish I could be doing every day, we do have the support of some limited outside counsel resources, and we have just been making it work so far.
ZBP
It’s crazy to me to think, and you already alluded to this, and obviously I’ve got experience in the insurance industry, not from the inside but obviously from the outside, and I know how heavily regulated they are and I know how many legal issues insurance companies face. There are plenty of insurance companies here in town that employ numbers of lawyers in droves, and so it’s almost crazy to me to think that you’re handling all those roles and responsibilities as just one person.
MI
Yeah, we’ll get there. We will get there for sure. We have taken a very measured approach to it. We will have a whole team of lawyers eventually.
ZBP
Tell us a little bit about Branch Insurance and what makes it different from a traditional insurance company. I mean, Columbus is home to a number of insurance companies, some of which have been here for well over a century. Tell us, as Branch enters the insurance market, what differentiates it from some of those older or more traditional players?
MI
Branch is on a mission to make insurance better and more affordable for more people so that more people can be insured, and we do that in a couple ways - one, by providing a frictionless experience for our customers. We provide also what we think are more affordable prices for our customers. We’re essentially trying to bring insurance back to what it was originally intended to be, a force for communal good, so we’re not really disrupting anything. We’re just trying to make it better and bring it back to a community of people getting each other’s backs in their time of need to prevent people from entering a period of financial ruin when faced with catastrophe.
ZBP
One of the things that we have talked about earlier was this idea that the policies are designed, you’re designed or shooting to do it and offer cheaper policies, and I think that one of the ways that we had talked about is that your underwriting, it’s just more efficient. If you could, can you kind of explain those efficiencies. I’m not looking for any kind of state secrets here, but if you could just kind of give us some kind of idea as to how Branch seeks to do that.
MI
Yeah, sure. With the caveat that I am not the Branch technology expert, thankfully, or else we would not be here today, our technology is super impressive. We have built technology that allows us to ping several secure data sources super quickly, so we obtain the information that we need to appropriately underwrite and price a policy super quickly. In most cases, we only need a name and address to get the process started, whereas the application process is much longer with other carriers and you oftentimes cannot complete the entire process online. This benefits customers in a few ways. Customers who come to us online are able to get accurate price for insurance and purchase a policy within minutes, so that’s super easy and convenient. Customers who come to us through agency partners or over the phone also benefit from that fast and easy purchase experience; however, one of the main benefits is that we also use the technology we had built to distribute through partners who embed our process directly into their existing website and purchase flows, so we are able to distribute through partners. We create these insurance moments, if you will, where they make sense, and that distribution allows us to reduce our acquisition costs, and we actually pass those cost savings directly onto our members, so that’s how you get from having cool technology to actual results that benefit customers.
ZBP
You talked about those moments that make sense. Can you give us an example of what one of those moments might be?
MI
Yeah, sure. For example, we partner with Rocket Mortgage, formerly known as Quicken Loans, and Quicken has been an investor and a long-time partner with us, and if you are doing a mortgage or a re-fi through the Rocket Mortgage website, you’ll find as one option for insurance, home insurance, which you need to close your home loan, you’ll find Branch, so you can click on that and get a price pretty much instantly, and then if you choose to purchase insurance from us, we will actually send that information direct to Quicken so that you don’t have to, so that you’re all ready to close on your house, so it makes it easy. We’re able to get you insured super quick, meanwhile that click has cost us next to nothing, whereas some insurers will pay $1,500 or more to acquire a policy, so that’s where you get the real cost savings that we are able to reflect in our pricing.
ZBP
Got it. Okay, that makes sense. Tell me, is Branch using any other technology which is more customer-facing to enhance the customer experience?
MI
Again, I’m not the tech expert and I only know the half of it, but we do use technology in many ways to enhance our customer, we call them our members, their experience. We have a mobile app where you can access your insurance cards, you can chat with our service team to make changes and you can file claims. You can also access Roadside Assistance if you need it, and as we work to continue to build out the Branch Claims Department, my colleague Charlie, who I mentioned, is actually working with several vendors that will allow us to provide our members with that high-tech claims experience. They’ll be able to do things like upload photos, receive instant updates as to what’s going on with their claim, so we really are keeping an open mind and trying to aim for the best experience possible using the best technology that’s out there today.