We’re pushing the boundaries of technology to revolutionize the insurance industry: Spike Lipkin (of Newfront) said while speaking with The Silicon Review

The Silicon Review

“Our approach gives us the data and scale to transform the entire market and change the way risk is addressed as a whole.”

The essential, yet deeply entrenched insurance industry looks alarmingly similar to how it did in the late 1600s when it began. Ship owners in London used to meet at Edward Lloyd’s coffee house, the precursor of Lloyd’s of London, to purchase protection for their sailing vessels before embarking on their voyage. Fast forward 340 years and the foundational elements of this industry remain largely consistent – until now.

Enter Newfront, an insurance brokerage that leverages bleeding-edge technology applications (think AI and predictive analytics models) to reinvent the delivery of risk management, employee experience, insurance, and retirement solutions through its proprietary platform. Transparent data delivered in real-time translates into a lower total cost of risk and greater insights. Headquartered in San Francisco, Newfront has offices throughout the country and is home to more than 800 employees who serve clients across the United States and globally.

The Silicon Review reached out to Spike Lipkin, Newfront CEO, and here’s what he had to say.

Interview Highlights

Q. What circumstances or events led to the creation of Newfront? Please brief us about the history so far.

For hundreds of years, insurance has powered commerce, driven innovation, and protected people

in their most difficult moments. Yet, in my experiences prior to Newfront, I kept seeing the industry and its ingrained in outdated processes and antiquated technology, unlike other sectors that keep advancing.

Rather than accept the status quo, we created Newfront to modernize our industry for colleagues, clients, and trading partners. While most were predicting that brokers would go away, we knew that they played a strategic role in helping clients through this important process. We began building technology to enable our insurance professionals to focus less on the manual tasks and more on the partnership and trust with clients.

By listening to our clients and employees, we began an iterative process to improve the insurance experience on both sides of the equation, influencing the broker, service team, and client experiences with technology.

Q. How does Newfront transform the insurance industry? What are its focus areas?

Our rare combination of technology and insurance expertise is key to transforming the industry. Newfront is focused on empowering our internal teams through automating and streamlining structured, repetitive tasks such as entering data and filling out forms. We are also turning unstructured information into structured data on a larger scale, offering insights and transparency to clients.

Q. Tell us about the Newfront team. What value do they bring to the company?

One of Newfront’s company values is Focus on People, and it shows in the talent and satisfaction of our employees. Top professionals are voting with their feet to join us from both established brokerages and technology companies.

We’re focused on attracting people who are passionate about modernizing insurance and activating a ripple effect of change across the industry. Our engineering, data, and product development team members are seen as a tremendous asset for recruiting insurance prospects, who are eager to work with the impressive minds who are transforming historically outdated processes. By putting the insurance experts and technologists side by side, Newfront offers a faster feedback loop designed to positively impact decision making.

An important part of this mission is and will always be a culture grounded in values, our ethos, and DE&I. Our talented team has been recognized across the industry. In 2023, several of our team members were named to the Power Broker list by Risk & Insurance, an annual selection of the most influential and effective commercial insurance brokers. Additionally, Newfront was named a Best Workplace by Inc. in 2023.

Q. What new endeavors is Newfront currently undertaking?

Newfront continues to invest in our product, infrastructure, and data model. Again, we have the rare combination of technology, scale, and leading teams across both technology and insurance. As artificial intelligence continues to take the world by storm, Newfront is already implementing tools to take on manual tasks off the desk of our team members and empower them to spend more time strategically advising clients. From a chatbot that can ingest and summarize company benefits for employees to extracting data from PDFs around loss runs and quotes, the implications on insurance and benefits are huge—and Newfront is leading the way with our in-house tech talent and years of investment in our platform that enables us to easily add these features.

The company has also released a variety of new features on our proprietary platform for both clients and internal users. Clients can now easily pay installment plans that span across multiple insurance policies, quickly email certificates to the requesting vendor or coworker, and securely upload disclosures, policy documents, and other sensitive files. Newfront service team professionals benefit from automated tedious tasks such as invoice creation, quoting plan comparisons and summaries, and email auto-logging. Additionally, in the past year, we introduced a custom vendor search tool on our client dashboard, where users can discover vendors, learn about a wide range of employee benefits offerings, and access expert advice all in one place. We also enhanced our clinical trial portal for Life Sciences clients, which allows trial managers to gain a multi-trial view of key policy inputs like renewal dates, number of participants, and requirements by country.

Q. What's the one thing you want Newfront to be known for?

Newfront is building a high touch and high tech offering where clients can seamlessly share information and make data-driven decisions, colleagues can focus on strategic deliverables with technology removing the administrative burden, and risk can be efficiently paired with capital on our platform. In a world where risk is ever increasing, innovation is vital to our future, and professionals are increasingly asked to take on more, this is a worthy mission.

Q. Is there anything you would like to add before we wrap up?

Newfront continues to grow its robust broker network and add top-notch talent to its team. Since the beginning of 2023, Newfront has welcomed several more well-known industry experts, including Chris James, Wendy Cook, Frannie Epps, Lauren Pratscher, Cole Wagner, Phil Huffman, Matthew Summers, and Jose Fontes, to continue building out its teams and accelerate growth. Each individual brings a different background and unique perspective to the table and can provide the best insights to Newfront clients.

Leadership | Newfront Insurance

Spike Lipkin is the CEO and Co-founder of Newfront. Prior to Newfront, he was one of the first employees at Opendoor, where he helped grow a five-person company into a business currently valued at more than $3 billion. Before Opendoor, Spike was an investor at Blackstone, where he served on the startup team that built Invitation Homes into the largest owner of single-family real estate in the United States.

Gordon Wintrob is the Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of Newfront, where he leads the development of Newfront's platform and operating system. Gordon attended MIT and worked at Morgan Stanley, Blackstone, and Goldman Sachs during his time there. Prior to Newfront, Gordon founded StackLead, a company that built automated technology to research sales leads. He sold that company to LinkedIn and it became LinkedIn's jobs product, aggregating millions of postings across the web.

Brian Hetherington is the President of Newfront and serves as the Chairman for the Worldwide Broker Network. With more than 20 years in executive leadership roles, Brian has a successful track record in technology sales at NightFire, N.E.T., and MCI Telecommunications. Brian attended Northwestern University for his BA (with honors), Northwestern’s Kellogg Graduate School of Business (McGovern Academic Scholarship), and Stanford Law School’s Directors College.

Kurt de Grosz is the Executive Chairman of Newfront. Kurt has thirty years of progressive insurance industry and software industry experience as a sales professional, operations executive, executive officer, founder, and CEO. He has focused on visionary product and service development to transform the insurance industry to meet 21st century business requirements. Kurt conceived and designed the original client portal, www.cybersure.com. Kurt co-founded BenefitPoint, Inc. and subsequently led the sale of the company to Vertafore, Inc. He was the Founder and CEO of Insurance Leadership Network, Inc. (ILN) – a search fund focused on insurance distribution that did its first two acquisitions in 2011. In 2012, ILN rebranded as ABD, and later, Newfront.