William Wagner: Top 10 Insurtech Influencers to Watch in 2023
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As Featured in CIO Look Magazine: “Top 10 Insurtech Influencers to Watch in 2023”
Traits that Signify Excellence and Aptness.
Running a business requires a constant flow of information within and outside the organization. Effective communication connects leadership with employees, enabling everyone to support core company values and work towards organizational goals.
Successful communication will help reduce email burdens, enhance employee commitment, boost employee productivity, and facilitate interdepartmental relationships. It also reduces employee turnover, improves customer satisfaction and retention, and contributes to a strong company culture.
Effective leaders think analytically about their businesses and those they oversee. They invest the time and effort to clearly understand any outstanding weaknesses, threats, strengths, and opportunities.
This helps them identify how to support the team and help them overcome problems. Great leaders know when to pivot, constantly evaluating their own input to see how it aligns with organizational policy and objectives. Standing out with these exceptional attributes is William Wagner, Vice President of Marketing at Patra Corporation.
Under Wagner’s proficient leadership, Patra is a leading provider of technology-enabled services to the insurance industry, serving Retail Agencies, MGAs, Wholesale, and Carrier companies.
In an interview with CIOLook, Wagner shares valuable facts that highlight significant facts that highlight his
professional tenure and his journey so far as a proficient leader in the niche.
Below are the excerpts from the interview:
Brief our audience about your journey as a business leader until your current position at your company. What challenges have you had to overcome to reach where you are today?
My professional career journey has been dynamic and across many industry verticals. I was fortunate to start my career as a product manager in the financial services and investment vertical, whereby my projects focused on understanding end-users’ needs. Why would they use our product, how would they use it, and what workflows and behaviours could I influence by designing for optimal end-user satisfaction?
This training made me appreciate the end user and the intense work needed to uncover customers’ hidden needs. That led me down the transition path from Product Management toProduct Marketing, bridging the gap between what is designed and built and how the product is positioned to the external market, and eventually transitioning to traditional Marketing where I am today. At Patra, I aim to communicate our company’s value to the insurance industry and how partnering with Patra enables growth, drives innovation and digitization, and ensures insurance organizations are future ready.
Tell us something more about your company and its mission and vision.
With a global team of insurance processing experts, we work closely with our clients to leverage technology and human capital to optimize how insurance policies are sold, managed, and supported.
Our vision is to bring economies of scale to our service offerings by driving innovation within every insurance economies of scale to our service offerings by driving innovation within every insurance organization so they can focus on their unique brand experience, customer satisfaction, and corporate profitability.
For the last 17 years, Patra has focused on hiring the best employees from across the US, Canada, Philippines, and India, creating a dynamic, work-fromhome environment, and providing training, guidance, and mentorship to deliver world-class services.
Patra was founded on the fundamental principle of “Do The Right Thing;” we do the right thing for our clients and their insureds, our employees and their families, and the communities where we live and work. Honesty, Integrity, and Respect are the three pillars of Patra.
Enlighten us on the impact you have made through your expertise in the market.
I believe that marketing aims to create a narrative that clearly outlines the benefits of working with Patra regarding pain points that insurance organizations feel across different areas of their business. I intend to showcase how small changes can have an incremental impact on how revenue is derived, how employee satisfaction can be enhanced, and how organizations can leverage our technology insights rather than try to figure out what to do on their own. As a marketer, if I can make the buying decision easy to understand the benefits, then we can bring efficiencies to the insurance ecosystem.
Describe in detail the values and the work culture that drives your organization.
Our culture and values start at the top with our CEO, John Simpson. John’s vision for how Patra has grown is grounded in our core values of Honesty, Integrity, and Respect. By applying those values to how we engage each other, our vendors, and our interactions with our clients and prospects.
Over 15 years of being a remote-based company require an extraordinary commitment to being aware of your employees, ensuring they have the tools and skills to accomplish their goals, and always keeping a pulse on their performance. From our Executive Leaders to individual contributors, open dialogue, freedom of expression, and a focus on DE&I ensure
everyone is welcomed and heard.
Undeniably, technology is playing a significant role in almost every sector. How are you leveraging technological advancements to make your solutions resourceful?
Technology investments and innovation are the nuclei of who Patra is. Early on, we believed technology is useful when combined with human capital. As such, we have invested millions of R&D in addition to growing our Engineering and Product Management teams to bring innovation and digitization to areas of the insurance policy lifecycle where our customers felt the most pain or inefficiencies.
We believe that developing technology without precisely aligning with market needs is foolish. It’s a hammer looking for a nail. Instead, we work closely with our 230 customers across over 700 offices to understand trends and common pain points and build solutions to address those pressing needs. This isn’t to say we don’t look toward market trends to drive our product roadmap, but we look at multiple forces when deciding how best to bring innovation to the market.
What change would you like to bring to the Insurance industry if given a chance?
I’d like to see the broader insurance industry embrace the notion that partnering with a service provider is a
net gain for their business and, ultimately, their customers. Partnering with a company to help, automate, and work 24/7 so that your staff can have a quality of life and you can focus on growing your business is healthy.
Consumers’ expectations have only increased, and nurturing customer relationships is becoming even more critical so one doesn’t become a commodity. To embrace that mentality, organizations need to think, “Where can my resources be deployed in the most efficient manner possible” and that often means outsourcing areas of the business to a service provider.
Where do you envision yourself to be in the long run, and what are your future goals for your company?
The insurance market is going through an evolution that has just begun. Decades-old processes and business structures are being challenged by aggressive consumer demands on customer experience and speed to resolution/response.
Because this evolution is in its early years, I want to help drive innovation and transformation in the industry. As part of that, help Patra grows domestically and possibly expand its footprint. Patra is well poised to continue our year-over-year growth as long as we focus on doing what is right for our customers and bringing innovation to the market where customers and prospects need it the most.
What would be your advice to budding entrepreneurs who aspire to venture into the insurance sector?
Having a clear understanding and empathy for your prospects is essential. In the insurance industry, we provide a piece of mind, ensuring assets that people covet most – their homes, cars, and businesses–items with a deep emotional connection.
Recognizing the importance of what insurance is will help entrepreneurs understand that our business is mission critical; it isn’t a nice to have or add-on; it is ‘the’ item that ensures business viability and, ultimately, success.