AdviceTech Podcast #32 – CDM Solutions – Transcript

Peita Diamantidis
Hello, and welcome to the ensemble advice tech podcast. My Peita Diamantidis and the guests joining me here today to deep dive into psidium solutions is originally from Johannesburg a place on my travel bucket list has qualifications in both financial planning and accounting so super qualified and has tackled the incredibly difficult and maddening insurance data challenge we all face. Thank thank you so much for joining me on the show, Katriel Warlow-Shill.

Katriel Warlow-Shill
Thank you, Peita. Yes, it’s a pleasure to be here. And it’s so good that people like yourself, like hearing about what we’re doing, because we are changing for the first time the life insurance, industry, and our ability as advisor to be able to provide meaningful advice and medical information.

Peita Diamantidis
It is exciting and it I’m going to look forward to diving into it, actually, because the data available has always been there. Right. And it’s, it’s, um, we’ll dive into in a second, you know, what you guys have now managed to do with this data that exists, but we fully, you know, get into the nitty gritty, let’s get to know you a little first through your use of technology. What is your most used emoji? Do you even use emojis?

Katriel Warlow-Shill
I don’t know if I’m technologically advanced data, which is a bit funny for a tech person. But the truth is, I don’t know anything about computers, per se, on there and needs sound solutions, and I understand what infrastructure needs to be. So for example, why do I need to do something manually? If a computer can do it for me? Right? Why do I need somebody to do something for me? If a computer could do it for me?

Peita Diamantidis
So I would have thought then you would use emojis? Because it would narrow down from you know, 12 words into one little image that you might indirect say via SMS or something like that, or is that not the case?

Katriel Warlow-Shill
And I’m sorry. Well, you all do what what what what emoji is is, is yours?

Peita Diamantidis
Well, you know what, you are the first person to ever ask me that. On the podcast where I don’t know, what are we 32 episodes in and nobody’s ever asked what one of the one of the ones I use the most, which is probably quite telling is the sort of mischievous purple troublemaker one it’s like a little little, almost like a evil face, you know, that’s got like a little troublemaker face, that all my friends know that it’s when I’m going to get up to some mischief. Aside from aside from laughing faces, that’s a big one for me to

Katriel Warlow-Shill
know, I think that’s probably what I do is I smile a lot. Because most of the responses, most of the responses that I’m giving are to people who are really giving a praise or a comment about how their life has been made so much easier. And instead of in a way taking credit for it or just or was you know, what do you say when somebody says thank you. So I probably smile a lot.

Peita Diamantidis
Yeah, that makes sense. That makes sense. And so then as somebody who so I’m assuming you do have a smartphone, though most of us do. Now that sort of unavoidable, isn’t it? If you had to take everything off your smartphone, all the apps and everything, what three? Would you keep?

Katriel Warlow-Shill
This probably quite easy for me to answer that. I would say it’s WhatsApp. Right? If the plain telephone. Yes. And it’s SMS. And why can I say that? Quite simply because I actually have an app on my phone, which at six o’clock in the evening, it shuts down everything until 10 o’clock the next morning, right? So I can’t use my phone for anything other than phone, SMS or WhatsApp? In other words to be able to communicate to people. Yeah. But I don’t serve at night and author ask because that’s time for the family.

Peita Diamantidis
Yeah. And it is it’s a bad habit that that Doom scrolling thing where we just sort of sit in and mindlessly absorb just like even just sitting in mindlessly absorbing a TV show you don’t really care about it’s a similar sort of behavior, isn’t it? Yeah. You know, and it’s, it’s not good for any of us. Alright, let’s dive into psidium solutions. For those that haven’t heard of you guys, why don’t we start with let’s go higher up and just talk about where you guys fit in this sort of advice tech FinTech space. So what category do you sort of generally fall under? And, you know, are there other tools you normally get lined up against? Are you sort of you’re sort of one on your own?

Katriel Warlow-Shill
So firstly, we’re one on our own. Yep. CDM actually starts download client database management. And the idea behind CDM is that we have infrastructure that will take data from any source and consolidate it and group it and standardize it so that you can get meaningful information on the data. Right? So as previously actually created a revenue system, or advisors so he took the all all the CSV files that advisors would receive In revenue statements, put them all together and consolidate them and then give advisors an interface within which they could search for revenue per client per policy per time period per provider. Yep. And that was deployed for about 500 advisors. And that was brilliant. That was that was changing providers, because if it was a border business, I’d be able to track the revenue from that business of that, or referrer, they’d be able to track the referrals, and actually share that information with a login for the tourists. That was good. When we created that once we created that we then went on to I went on to then creating, trying to create CDM. And it blew my mind that, as an advisor myself at that stage for 12 years, why do I have to log into several different insurance companies to get information? Why is there not one source of truth for all insurance? And obviously, the biggest providers in the market? Are? They explain and advise logic? And every time I had a conversation with them, their answers were along the lines of look, insurance are not our main thing. Most of it is around investments, right? Therefore, it just wasn’t a priority for them. And even whatever they did was not 100% reliable. And even what was reliable wasn’t 100% of my clients wasn’t actually a solution that could be dependent on Yeah, okay. So then I started searching about eight years ago for different developers, different providers around the world. Can somebody do this? Because I just need it. Yeah. And, you know, scouring the internet every three months, couldn’t find anyone, and started looking for local developers, international developer, somebody, somebody, somebody went through the process of getting some sort of proto type. But whenever we tested it, it fell apart. And whenever it fell apart, the developers couldn’t do it. We didn’t couldn’t do to it what we needed to be done. Right. At that was until February last year, when I got a new set of developers on board. Every last year, we redesigned recreated the system. And we took on some beta testers. And every time a Betta and advisor asked said, you know, this is wrong, this is wrong, this needs to happen. Can we get this? Can we get that the developers are amazing, they just did it. And everything just worked. And then we went commercial in August, I think we’re sitting now at about 100 practices with 150 to 200 advisors around the country, with really large practice of practices with three and 4000 clients, adding inquiries coming in from practices that have got 20 30,000 clients, and dealer groups coming on board to say, this is a solution that every advisor needs. And because we’re the only ones doing it, everybody needs it. Yeah.

Peita Diamantidis
So to talk about so let’s talk about the data. Because clearly, like you said, you started in revenue. And and I don’t know how many of the listeners know this, but the revenue data we get contains a lot of information, doesn’t it? I mean, there’s in those files, there’s all sorts of stuff that comes with that. And and the providers have lots of information they can provide. So I’m I’m betting that, like you were just describing the biggest challenge was at the how do we pull it together? So it’s both a consistent and be useful, as opposed to getting the data at all because it sort of was always there? You know, it was it’s just there was so much of it from so many different places that kept on changing their format, all that sort of stuff is was that one of the challenges?

Katriel Warlow-Shill
The challenges were? Yeah, the visors, their insurance, changing their format. The insurance not provided consistent information. I think maybe the the major part of was actually finding technology or infrastructure that we could use that could mix and match. Right? which I thought would be very easy. But, you know, took seven years to realize that it’s not easy. Yep.

Peita Diamantidis
Yes, well, this is one of those categories of, of tech, that seems blindingly obvious that we should have always had it, it isn’t firmly in that category. You know, it’s but it’s just all the information that’s there individually brought into one place. You know, it doesn’t seem like too big ask, but it clearly has been because you’re there, you know, pushing at the forefront of it still only now able to get there. You know, it’s sort of seems a bit mystifying, doesn’t it? Like it’s, this is crazy, all we’re asking for and we’re not talking about complexity of analysis or complex, you know, any of this or magic of AI and all these things that nobody talks about now. It’s literally taking some data and making it you know, bringing it together and making it accessible in a really useful way.

Katriel Warlow-Shill
Right. So that’s that’s how we started. But then as soon as we did reach that milestone of getting all the data from all the providers, what Elvia not all the providers were on board initially. So were the providers actually don’t have technology that we can just log in and get it ourselves. So a lot of the time we actually use like what ex plan does with their data feeds. The advisor puts in their username and password and we get If the data from the portal Yep. And other providers sent us the data directly, other providers now we’ll send it to the advisor and the advisor sends it on to our site. The art is collected in a variety of ways. But not everyone was there additionally for what’s actually happening is that, for example, look up a name drophead, you know, all of the providers have been very good, where you would have a meth lab had a large advisor with a lot of meth lab policies. And that advisor then asked MetLife, but we’re consolidating all our insurance information into CDM. We can’t get MetLife. And that’s a problem. So then math reached out to us. Yeah, we’ve worked out the method how to get the data, like was it intended to lock was in the arts? Yeah, though, the insurers are actually coming to us now. And as well, as you know, the evidence of none of the CRMs are doing what we’re doing. We actually had a meeting with one of the two largest providers a few weeks ago, where they’ve got advisors coming to them and saying, You guys are not doing insurance beans? Well, we’re using CDM. For our insurance beats don’t trust audit, can we import from CDM into the CRM and CRM then reached out just to say, how can they do it? And we’ve had a number of inquiries from the large and large up and coming CRMs, who have got clients who are using CDM, who are asking the CIO, the Vita. How can they get the CRM, the CDM data into their CRM, so sales was five Italie. Flow is on board now. Perfect. So we’re, my philosophy have been, look, it’s not about me having some sort of monopoly or some sort of control, whatever information in CDM, that belongs to an advisor, but also that advisor and the advisors are asked me, Can we export that in a particular format for a particular provider of precursors to your particular CRM. And that’s not a problem, whether that’s what we’re doing?

Peita Diamantidis
Yeah. So let’s go to the and we’ll get to, we’ll get to sort of integrations and things like that in a bit. But in terms of the first level of efficiency, or simplicity, or just, you know, staying sane. anybody listening who has any, even a small number of insurance clients will almost certainly have experienced in the last, I guess, a year or so horrible white times to call a provider when you’re just trying to ask something simple, or even logging on to an online platform, and it just not having what you need, and therefore you’ve got a call, you know, I mean, that’s quite a common two step process.

Katriel Warlow-Shill
Actually, one of the things that propelled us to probably the second stage in development was that issue where I saw an advisor who had about 2000 clients, he had somebody who would come in his office for about 20 hours a week, to try and speak to the insurance companies to try and get the renewal upcoming renewal data, and then populate renewal notices to send out to clients. Yeah. So once CDM had all that information, we have the inception data, the policy, we have the premium we have Drew, the owner of the policy is oftentimes we have loadings and exclusion, we have all we have the address, we have the clients phone number, we have the clients email address, we have all that information. So now all that needs to happen is initially the advisor would just download the report into Excel about all policies coming up for renewal next month. And that would save them having to speak to all the different insurance companies our regular basis. Yeah, the information would just flow through again, saving heaps of time. Absolutely. And

Peita Diamantidis
even, it’s interesting, you know, clients can have quite simple queries, or can you just confirm this feature that I’ve got? Or, or wait, you know, what is the current premium? I want to check that what’s coming out of my bank account. And so to have a single place where the you know, the team can first go to go Alright, let me just check quickly. And it’s not that I’m going to have to come back to you, I’ve got to make a phone call. I’ve got an

Katriel Warlow-Shill
ad. So Peter, so you know, case scenarios is an a client calls the advisor for that exact question. Hi, you know, how much am I insured for? Yeah, and when the client calls up? That’s when they want to talk about it. Yeah. So if the advisor says, you know, I’ll call you back in 10 minutes. It’s too late. Yeah, we’re having advisors now of coming back with feedback along the lines that because I had the answer for the client on the spot, I was able to engage in a new business, and I was able to solve the client’s problems. And everybody was happy.

Peita Diamantidis
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And even if it’s, you know, the support team taking the call, then when you think about it, otherwise, client calls in, great take message, make query to either website or provider, come back, try and call the client, it takes two to three goes because you’ve got to catch them, like the whole process is about five or six steps. When, as you’re saying, if that can all just be done initially while you’re on the phone with them. And then of course, if it needs to be escalated, Add from a support person to the advisor, you know, you can train your team to do that well, but But you know, taking out all of that, trying to get back to them leaving messages like all that insanity, it’s, it’s just unnecessary and it’s not doing the best work for them, you know, it’s, it’s actually getting all of the team caught up in like you were describing before, you know with renewables, it’s getting caught up in a whole lot of, you know, manual sort of data and difficulty instead of actually engaging with the public.

Katriel Warlow-Shill
Right. And it’s not utilizing the staff. Yep. And a lot of advisors happy to just to have somebody coming in to print off a renewal notices or email renewal notices, and your ad, you know, it’s a minimum that needs to be done for the practice. Yeah, one of that redeploying that person to actually do in quotes. Yes, or, or, you know, other value add,

Peita Diamantidis
and particularly, when it’s across a large, you know, a huge chunk of clients that this applies to, and you’re having to manually do things, then when you do have insurers that have some either the, you know, staffing issues or whatever it goes on, and your 10 minute call turns into a 40 minute, wait time, then, you know, the whole, your whole team just gets sucked up into this stuff. It’s just disastrous. And I’ve seen that in our practice, where I started to look and go, am I going to need to get more admin people just because they’re sitting on the phone so long? Like, you know, this is this is not where we should be, as you say, where we should be applying our resources. That’s just, if I’m gonna get new people, wouldn’t it be great if it was actually adding value? That’s nice, too, you know, almost being subcontractors for for the providers, really, because we have to, you know, do some of their work. So, okay, so we’ve got getting quite, you know, getting some details on what they might be covered for maybe what their current premium is that makes some that makes sense. I’m aware, there’s like a sort of a click of a button policy summary. If somebody wants just to get that snapshot of what they currently have, is that available across a few policies? So if they’ve got, you know, a couple of different products?

Katriel Warlow-Shill
Yeah. So what we even provide is we provide a snapshot for client based on last name and date of birth. Yep. So if they have the same last name and date of birth across multiple providers, our summary will include all that information. Great. Great. And then and then we also now lately arm arm up jumping the gun, but pretty exciting. We now integrate with one of the research houses. So if the clients on the phone, you go, Hey, Cottrell, how much am I paying for life insurance. So I’ve put up CDM. And it says, You got policies across tal AIA and Zurich, and you’ve got a million dollars with each, I push a button and it opens up the research and it says for $3 million of insurance. This is what it will cost with the other providers. Right. So we’ve had advisors that are that are, you know, going through that whole process and five minutes with a client on the phone from the time the pod calls is sort of all the backwards and forwards?

Peita Diamantidis
Yep, yep. Exactly. Because I mean, the real value, as we all know, with insurance is going to end up being about, you know, yes, we need to do those comparisons. And it’s always what they want to hear about loss, I mean, money, but it’s, it’s about, you know, what features that they got, what, you know, terms can change how much cover all those sort of things. And so you’ve, you know, if you can make everything else faster, then it lets you have the real conversation.

Katriel Warlow-Shill
That’s why I focus on the medical stuff. Yeah, exactly. So bread and butter. This is just like you expect this from a CRM, and none of the CRM is for lives.

Peita Diamantidis
Yeah, absolutely. And I was sort of, I was contemplating, actually, of what it’s been like to date for us, particularly with insurance, where there are, you know, on the, on the website, there are and, you know, well, they’re not necessarily perfect, but there are sort of data feeds and why to bring that together. But insurance, it’s a bit like if you know, like, I want to watch a movie, you’d have to know who the lead actor is. And then you’d log into just the streaming service service for George Clooney movies. And then, you know, if you want to watch a different movie, where you got to go to that other streaming service, because that’s just for somebody else’s movies, like it’s this ridiculous, there’s no reason that can all be in one place. That’s why you know, and so, alright, so the other element that you mentioned, policy renewals as well, that’s can be something that’s, you can get really proactive with which, depending on how big and or how big a proportion insurance is, in the practice, they may or may not be getting on the front foot of that. So that’s a great opportunity to sort of reach out ahead of time.

Katriel Warlow-Shill
Well, most advisors that we’ve spoken to, either they’re too small to have resources to be able to employ renewal notices been sent out at eyes. Yep. While they’re very large, and they just have a human doing it. Yeah, cost a lot of money. Yep. Yep, absolutely. I think I’ll just remember your question was, what else? Was that your question?

Peita Diamantidis
Sorry, what was that?

Katriel Warlow-Shill
What else we might be doing?

Peita Diamantidis
Oh, well, actually, um, so there was policy renewals, but our but I also remember taking quick look, there was also, you know, sort of overdue premiums all being in one place rather than this getting those notices from all the different places. What

Katriel Warlow-Shill
happened was MLC stopped sending Atmos payment notices to advisors, and the first time the advisor would be made aware of a miss premium would be when they received a lapse notice. Wow. And obviously, advisors were very disappointed. And the feedback from the MLC was, look, it’s available on the portal. So if you and advise, as an advisor, just log in every Monday or whatever, you’ll be able to see all the information. So whilst that is a satisfactory answer, meaning, you know, the information is available, now we have to now allocate another resource. Yeah, we just log into a website to see what’s overdue. So we spoke to MLC, and they will work with us. And we now had in our portal, and other jus module. So if a client doesn’t, it’s a premium, it’s on the report could be went one step further. We actually, through CDM, email the client from the advisors office, saying, Hello client, do you know that you Mr. Premium? Right. So it’s automating that process of mist premiums as well?

Peita Diamantidis
Yeah, because there is we’ve all had clients, like there’s just some clients that are managing their cash flow to such an extent that invariably that’s going to happen, you know, like, it’s, they haven’t moved the money from where, to where, and all that sort of stuff. And, and we, I’m sure, we’ve all experienced that and following those up as maddening. Because it’s, you know, it’s not somebody accidentally once off which of course, you know, of course, you want to follow it up, but the person that’s just doing this repeatedly, it’s like one, is there, not a way to automate that so Okay, so the system clearly absorbs in data collates it makes it easily accessible and reportable. But what you’ve added there is automation triggered by certain situations against a client, and overdue premiums being one of them.

Katriel Warlow-Shill
overdue and renewals? And also, I know we have provisional lapses as well, I’m not sure what we’re up to with the actual emails of that. But the interesting thing about the way CDM is doing is working, is that every day picked up, I am getting updates about new features that have been added. Yep. So I would not be surprised about the time, you know, four weeks from now, it’ll be a different solution. Yep. So for example, one of the things we’re working on is, currently we have I can tell you, how many providers I’m using my business, how many clients they have for each provider? What is the enforce premium? What is the split of that premium across? Life insurance, TPP, Troy income particular cetera? Yeah, the premium. And the benefits, of course, there’s different categories. But what what we’ve been working on now is actually to get a revenue expectation across each policy. Okay. So for example, if I have policy 123456, with neoss, and it’s paying a recurring revenue of 10%, and I have a 1234589 10. Policy with integrity, I was paying 22%. Yeah, now have the ability within the system to generate an actual value or recurring value, right? Or the income for the business, and then we will then incorporate comparing that to actual income received? Yep. And

Peita Diamantidis
it isn’t, it’s an interesting thing with when it’s changed in wealth with the way we renew fees, and all that sort of thing. Lots of people have, you know, that it’s quite a proactive and really easily accessible level of fee. Like, it’s, there’s just far less of that tail for most people, you know, I mean, that still exists to a certain extent, but I’m betting that as the the information you guys can collect gets better and better, then you can start to identify those policies or clients where, you know, the amount getting paid to the adviser is so small that it’s going to start to be just non viable for that particular client. Or they at least have the information to make that decision. That’s, yeah, yeah. Fantastic. So the other thing I noticed was then for something like the policy summary, there’s some branding or or design that can get applied to that. So it’s something that can be for, you know, look and feel of your practice. Is that correct?

Katriel Warlow-Shill
Yeah. So it’s amazing. In one of the previous iterations, the email that would go out for renewal was hard coded. So an advisor would have to say, this is the email that we this is why we wanted to look yeah, every advisor would have to change it say in an upgrade a while ago, you now have the ability to put in your own text, your own logos, your own headers, footers on all the emails that go out of business out of your business. Fantastic. And then what we did is the policy schedules we had a lot of advice requests thrown by us to include the policy shedule in the email that goes out from the practice with the renewal notice Yep, so we did that. And then we ended by as a side note, you know, our colors are a little bit different our logos a little bit different. So we did that is created the first teaching moment and then to fix that for the advisor. And now we’ve got, you know, large practices, one, very specific information, specific layouts, etc. And we’re actually just matching it. I don’t know how the guys are doing it. Yeah, but they are they’re giving the advisors exactly what they want.

Peita Diamantidis
Fantastic. Yeah. And so are you seeing and so let’s talk about the you know, for practice that this works really well for, are they going as far as for example, maybe the template emails they want, you know, have the renewal information, perhaps have, like you say the policy shedule attached, but also Hey, click on this link, if you want to have an appointment with an advisor, like, are they sort of taking it that far? So the client,

Katriel Warlow-Shill
every meeting that I have with a new advisor, I tell them the success that advisors are having with candidly. Yep. So we’ve Calendly is simply you put that into your renewal renewal email, you’re happy birthday email, your missed payment, email, whatever it is, yep. And advisors just getting calls and appointments booked, and others aren’t having to do anything.

Peita Diamantidis
Yep. Fantastic. Fantastic. So it really, it sounds like the the first temptation I can I can see, some people would see this almost as a data dislike a distant tool that you might refer to, whereas it sounds like to really take advantage of it. It starts it’s starting to, you know, really folded into your processes and how you’re going to do your ongoing service.

Katriel Warlow-Shill
Absolutely. And I think, look, it’s just about anyone who realizes that technology can save a lot of time and effort. Yeah, fortunately, nobody’s got a right. So as long as nobody’s got a right, it hasn’t been anything that advisors can rely on. Yes. As you know, elixir from, from Perth, and with all their clients, you know, they’re they, they they’ve realized, no, this is the best thing for anyone who has any sort of risk business. Yeah, the admin of the risk business is tiny, the cost for using the solution is so tiny, and even if the business is huge, it’s still a tiny cost, and others are making back their investments, you know, within a month or two over a whole year as costs. So yeah, absolutely. I don’t believe that there’s anyone who knows what they doing that would not benefit from psidium. And even know what I would have taken further said anyone who doesn’t know what they’re doing will benefit. Because if you don’t know what you’re doing CDM will just run your business for you. Yeah, do know what you’re doing while you’re just use CDM to make much more efficiencies and just get back to us. And you’ll get advisor come back and say we want a group and an age group and age group report, state based report of where our clients lie and how old our clients, I’d say, but so whatever we’re getting asked for, we’re delivering and so whenever you can use, what do you think you could use to make your life better? Just ask.

Peita Diamantidis
And I think that’s a really important point, I think with lots of technology solutions, and yours is a really good example where the early users and probably the ongoing users are going to absolutely define where the development goes, because they’re bothering to give feedback. And I think, you know, from the battle days have huge providers that we struggled to even reach a person to talk to, I think that will just change so significantly, I think it’s, it’s on us to actually give the feedback, I really think it’s our responsibility to go, you know what, it’d be great if you noticed, because now it made providers have their development plans, and they, you know, they can’t do everything all at once. But they absolutely can’t do something they don’t know about. And, you know, most I mean, it’s a bit different to yourself who’s actually operating in the space, but, but most tech providers, you know, aren’t running a live practice right now. So they’re not going to actually see the living breathing challenges or needs,

Katriel Warlow-Shill
right, I think that’s probably the point of difference is that it is actually very hard to do. Oils, we understand what it is that’s needed, we’ve been able to put it together. Yep.

Peita Diamantidis
And it is an important. It’s a different lens, isn’t it? Like it’s a unique single lens, and I would put what you guys here, have pulled together here into a similar category to product RX. I don’t know whether you’ve ever looked at them. But But Nick, there has done a similar thing where he deeply understands this specific lens of data, you know, like, it’s okay, this is what we need out of this. And therefore, I’m going to create something that solves that problem. And what it does do is it means you very quickly get wins because somebody understands it deeply enough. You so so I can I can absolutely believe that practices can just go well. And I think the other thing I would say is if you have like you say really any you know, small number, but any decent number of insurance clients, and you don’t have something like this, and think you know what, but it’s all it’s all handled. I don’t think this is a big issue for my practice, then I would argue it’s probably time to have some really good brainstorming conversations with your support team because the one single string class see and every support team member is their ability to plow through crazy tasks that are repetitive and difficult and just get it done. Right. And what that means is we don’t hear that it’s hard because they just do it and if you not aware, then you don’t realize that, like you’re saying that it’s difficult to either just log on and get the details or they’ve got to wait on the call. They’ve got to you know, they don’t because they just got they just get it done. It’s it feels easy to me as the advisor, I don’t have to do that, you know? Right. So I would argue almost all of us will be experiencing this and our practices some way, it just may not be for us. And so it’s important that we sort of, you know, understand that a little better and ask the questions, because I guarantee you, anybody that’s having to deal with insurance information, or insurance will be

Katriel Warlow-Shill
one of the lead questions that are asked, every time I’ve ever thought about that meeting with a potential new adviser. I just asked him, how many clients do you have in your practice? Yeah. And the closest absolutes ever, about 100 meetings? The best answer I got was, well, we’ve just done our whole annual review for the entire year. And we’ve called all the information from all the different providers. And as of a month ago, I continue to eat was X Y, Zed. But nobody has been able to tell me how much how many clothes they have in their practice. So there’s one answer that CDM provides. Yep. The other answer that Sita provides is I would ask you, Pete, I give it as a PDF. How much life insurance do I have? What would you do?

Peita Diamantidis
If you did that? It’d be it’d almost be an averaging exercise. For the practice. Is that what you mean? Like, how much cover do we have across our clients?

Katriel Warlow-Shill
And I’d say if I’m a client of yours, all right, and I want to answer

Peita Diamantidis
Yep. Then I’d have for almost all the insurers have a look, I’ll get back to you, right.

Katriel Warlow-Shill
That’s not okay.

Peita Diamantidis
No, it’s not okay. And even if I mean, we’ve got a great CRM, so my only hope would be the team might have made a note recently, but even then it’s only up to date to the most recent notes somebody’s made,

Katriel Warlow-Shill
right. So we have like a date stamp on every record. Yeah. So when I log in, and you say, we would like you to save parameters, you have to have you log into CDM. And you say, Okay, I found a document your records here. And I can tell this was updated yesterday, because a lot of the policies were applied three times a week. So you would be able to say I can see as of yesterday was, you know, a million dollars? Yeah. So, again, advisers can’t do that. No, there’s even either they don’t have access to the information. So they’ll at best, they’ll say, Look, I’ll log into the portal, hopefully, I’ll get the right portal, and I’ll get the right information. Or they have offshore or local support staff, staff, updating CRMs. Most of them don’t updated regularly. Yep. But if the client actually wants to know, the evidence of those advisors that have got human resources, updating information is not necessarily correct.

Peita Diamantidis
No, no, absolutely. So here’s a question for you. And I’m putting you on the spot here. So I apologize in advance. Let’s imagine somebody has because, you know, advisor codes, and what policies are under what advisor? Because all those sort of things can be variable, depending on how practices have developed over time and merge and all those sorts of things. Do you have an ability once, once the data is in, right? So we’ve got policies, and therefore clients into CDM? Do you have an ability in the system to then have us assign them to a particular advisor rather than the one that you know the code that they might be under?

Katriel Warlow-Shill
Well, we had an a meeting. So we went, we’ve just done the risk and Ficus Expo they’ve been throughout the country. Yep. So we’re in meets in Sydney, where a meeting with an advisor who asked that exact question, they have about three or 4000 clients, multiple advisors. And they said, Can they do just that they want to allocate so that emails go out from the particular advisor and right, I mean, to that particular advisor, that I saw the email without anything on Friday, say that’s well done.

Peita Diamantidis
Fantastic. Because it does let you then, for example, once you’ve done that, then the templated email can have their unique calendar link or you know, like, all those things become, yeah, more possible at that point

Katriel Warlow-Shill
out. So we have different models, we have, for example, theater group model where they can access all clients. Then we have business model where business can access all parts of advisor level, which is advisor can access either only their old clients or the clients in the business. Right. But a lot of different options with when it comes to setting up. Yeah, okay. What I’ve realized I see what clients

Peita Diamantidis
fantastic. So let’s just and you mentioned early earlier integration or, you know, some imaging intelliflo, for example, how you are how are they looking to utilize that connection house? What’s the what are they hoping for? What are those integrations hoping to do?

Katriel Warlow-Shill
Well, at the moment, there is not one CRM in the country that has all insurance information. Yep. I never wanted to create a CRM because I didn’t want to create something that other people have done. I only ever wanted to provide a service. So I never anticipated creating a CRM, I still don’t anticipate creating a CRM. Yep. But from the CRM providers who are now contacting us, they understand that they need to be able to provide insurance stock? So we’re not getting close water them saying how can they get our data? Right? And our own fear is, it’s there, you know, just find a client just concider Yep. And that client will be able to access kit, they will be told how they get the data into their particular CRM, they’ll come back to us. And they’ll say, we need to do this particular format with these particular fields, whether it’s an XLS, file a CSV, or it’s some sort of file transfer. Yep, I will do it. So you know, whichever CRM is flexible enough to take in data, we will give it to them.

Peita Diamantidis
Fantastic. So it sounds like though from a provider of proof, sorry, from an advisors perspective, you know, step one, start using CDM. So that then you can see the benefits. And then step two, nag, your CRM advice, Doc, provide, you know, solution, and say, I need you to talk to CDM, then we can take, because I think often when I see people embark on these things, they sort of go at it from the other angle. And it’s all about, well, we need to get the integration first. And I’m a bit of a believer that, hey, there’s efficiencies that exist from the tool just on its own. Yeah, let’s just build those down and get a really good understanding of what it does and what it’s capable of, and then worry about integrating.

Katriel Warlow-Shill
So two things, I’ll add on to that. The first thing is that the CDA will do whatever you want. So you just need to imagine use your imagination. If I have all my insurance dots in one place, what can I do with it? Yep, that’s what we’re doing. Certainly, there are larger CRM to which I’ve mentioned already, which don’t allow an email to be sent out on an individual basis, say 30 days before renewal, right? So not necessarily will every CRM be better than medium as a standard load, because CDM is a standard, it will save a lot of time when it comes to overdue. And that note most of the thing emailed which the CRMs may or may not be able to do. So that was like the juice of the renewals. There may or may not be able to do but yeah,

Peita Diamantidis
yeah, for sure. And I think that’s, you know, it’s important to see, I think people get really caught up with that single, you know, it’d be better if it was just all in one place. And I get why that seems good. But to be honest, if something’s doing a job really well, let’s just enjoy that, you know,

Katriel Warlow-Shill
yay, open in another window.

Peita Diamantidis
Exactly. Like, it’s like, this is such a big win. And I do think I’m a big fan of let’s go for the mammoth win, that can be a huge, and I can see that with a tool like this, like we can really, like just take that insanity out of our poor teams hands that have the stuff they’ve got to do and make it really accessible. And, you know, quickly accessible. Yeah. And then, you know, do the big win first, and then down the track. Hey, sure, you know, integration is great, but I think let’s, you know, focus on that big rock first, you know, and get that sorted. So then, you know, is there anything that you’ve seen that people are doing really clever or surprising things with the tool? Yeah, I mean, I know it’s early days, really. But, you know, there any users really surprised you with what they’ve managed to pull off?

Katriel Warlow-Shill
Are they better? The answer is that every day, we got a visor last month, can we do this? Can we do that? Or that put into ideas? Yeah. And then redeploy them to everyone. Yeah, my biggest challenge and I can’t, I can’t, I haven’t figured it out yet, is because we’re using new features every day. How do we communicate that? Right? How does somebody who goes to our website actually know what we’re doing? Because it’s changing all the time? Yeah, right. Yes, lots of new things coming out. So I’ll give last week I think was either last week or the week before, advisors wanted to customize the policy shedule that goes out there, or even got that go back as the firstly, the policy schedule was not attached to the email that went out to a client for a renewal. Yep. Then we had advisors, can we now please attach her policy federal funds? We did that. The the next one last week or week before was we want to now password protect their PDF? Right. So we did that with lots of different features, I think also, you know, added in x plan, Client ID fields, which you can manually, okay. And then then applies not only to expert, but any CRM. Yep. So that’s the sort of unique ID that connects it. And depending on that particular advisor, practice how technology has to they are will will dictate, you know, what more they can do with the data that they’re getting from us. Yeah, our data is often walk Rick than what the advisors having a CRM because it’s coming from directly from the insurer. Yeah, absolutely. And we’re advisors so clients will tell the insurer if they need to change your address or email or phone number, but Mondays so tell the advisor

Peita Diamantidis
Absolutely. And that’s something that can come up, you know, it’s natural that they’ll they’ll get something in the posting, oh, I need to update that. Like, that’s the trigger. So, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And how about down I mean, I certainly there’s a consistent message with the development that you’re responding to what your users are asking for, is there anything specifically on the development path that’s maybe a bigger chunkier thing that you guys are working towards?

Katriel Warlow-Shill
I would say the best thing that we’re going to do hopefully in the near future periods. Firstly, I mentioned about the revenue management, not management, but reporting automation actual Yeah. But the most exciting thing I think, will be when I speaking to insurance companies themselves, let’s say we have a quarter of a million or a million insurance policies within CDM. Why can’t neoss For example, provide us or help us provide a solution where they go through a quote every one of those Lydian policies? So we have occupations, often we have dates of birth, we have sons insured. Yeah, we have current of premiums. So why not one that why does it have to be a manual process one at a time, where we get a quote for that particular policy, when another provider would charge? One I’d have it provided for on a weekly basis, where advisors get a report saying, these are your top 20 clients that are paying 20 or 30%, more than what another provider would charge? Right? And that’s not a solution. And that’s why my answer, but it’s a good place to walk into the office on a Monday morning.

Peita Diamantidis
Yes, yes, absolutely. And, and I can see, I mean, what you’re essentially saying is it could sort of live, it’s a living, breathing update, at any point. And even if even if it wasn’t, you know, triggered as a big report, even if it was just the next time you logged in, you’d look to the right and see the comparison and go Oh, hold on, is we’ve now hit that point that it makes sense to bring this up. The clients reached out anyway, like all of those sorts of things are, are incredibly powerful when they’re at your fingertips. You know, and that’s the difference if, if it’s much harder than trigger that yourself. You know,

Katriel Warlow-Shill
there’s just a human resource doing it at the lab. It was it should be, it should be electronics sized?

Peita Diamantidis
Yeah, absolutely. Automatic automatic. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And once again, just like we said before, let’s focus on the human element of it, and have the data at our fingertips. That’s exciting. So is there anything else? I’m sure there is. But is there anything else? We’ve missed any core elements of the system that we haven’t covered?

Katriel Warlow-Shill
No, I don’t think so. I mean, probably the time that we’ve spoken, the developers have come up with new features. But for the intensive purposes, if you have an insurance business, and you’re not using CDM, you’re gonna get left behind?

Peita Diamantidis
Well, and probably I mean, you know, at the very least, I’m a big fan of finding, you know, some immediate bandwidth wins for people and for their teams. And it sounds like if you’ve got insurance clients, and this is one that could be an immediate can give your team back some bandwidth, you know, you can, you know, redeploy them for other things. And it’s a consistent messages message coming from advice practices, is they either need more people, or they need their current people to have more bandwidth. So, you know, it absolutely falls into that category. All right, advice, explorers. If you’d like to find out more about psidium solutions in the website, link is in the episode, show notes, along with Katrina’s LinkedIn details. So I’m sure you’d be happy. If you reached out to him, he’ll then point you in the right direction of who can help and who can take you on that journey. Look, thank you so much for joining us, Katherine, and for Tasha, tackling such a huge task, that we will all benefit from you sort of fighting through the data war. And, you know, ultimately making insurance policyholders lives easier, which is something that I think, you know, it’s not often we get to say that. So I think, you know, if we can respond in a faster way to our clients for their queries, then that’s certainly going to put a smile on his face. So thank you for doing that hard work for all of us. Thank you.

Katriel Warlow-Shill
And one last thing that I did, as you mentioned that, I think that it wouldn’t be too far off to be able to say, advisors give their clients access via username password to be able to access their own policy information that why does the client need to call the advisor Why call the conscious and log in and get the information themselves?

Peita Diamantidis
Fantastic. Oh, well, I’m gonna hold you to that. Now. You’ve you’ve put that in the public forum, catch room where you were getting the ensemble community will be will be on your case. Thank you so much for your time and for joining us.

Katriel Warlow-Shill
Thank you so much.