Technology is one of the pillars of excellent service for ABD's clientele and one of the drivers of efficiency for employees. Rising from $4 million gross to $62 million about five years, they are clearly doing something—multiple things—right. ACT News caught up with Brent Rineck, chief information officer at ABD Insurance & Financial Services, to get his take on the upside of the tech story. (This interview has been edited for concision.) 

ACT News:  As a young man, you got your bachelor's in management information systems then an MBA at Marquette. Tell us a little about your travels from writing in C to sitting in the C-suite. 

Brent Rineck:  There was basically a common theme the whole time. When I was a senior in college, there was a campus recruiting event where companies were hiring interns. I got picked up by Northwestern Mutual Life and worked as an intern for seven months.  After that, they offered to place me in a position when I graduated at the end of the spring semester. I looked around a little but decided that was a good fit. I started there as a programmer but found after a few years I wanted to be more involved with marketing and product development. I landed a position in the selling and marketing department and did that for a few years.

Each year, the company provided a statement on retirement and your financial outlook. I saw my life kind of charted out for me. I wanted to take a little more risk, so I started looking to branch out. Tech start-ups in the insurance space were looking for guys like me. It was the beginning of the dot-com boom. I moved to San Francisco and worked at InsWeb for two years, then BenefitPoint and Vertafore.  I was exposed to so much and I soon found myself running an entire business line.

Kurt de Grosz, my former colleague and President at BenefitPoint, created “The ABD Team" in 2012. The following year, he posted the CIO position, and I went for it. The leadership at ABD considered CIO position as an investment -- not an expense -- so we got right to creating a strategy that would benefit clients and increase efficiency.

Shortly after I started at ABD, I became aware of a new product called Amazon WorkSpaces (AWS), which is a virtual desktop hosted by Amazon's massive infrastructure. It was a big change. Our computers used to house an enormous amount of corporate information.  Now, they are simply endpoints to a virtual desktop in the cloud. That might sound a little scary to some who are comfortable with legacy systems, but once people started using it, they started to appreciate the many benefits it offers.

So now it doesn't matter if someone forgets their device at home or they're in another office; we just hand them a laptop or zero-client and say, “Here you go." They can get to any of their work from anywhere. We have a stack of devices ready to go, which also helps us as we scale up staff.  Samsung even has a dock that allows a Galaxy phone to run our Windows desktop on large monitors.  I'd love to get to the point where we just have one device.

ACT News:  Did you walk into ABD with this tech-forward vision? 

Brent:  I had a vision, but needed to understand the current environment before making any decisions.  ABD was outsourcing IT when I first started, but it was very expensive, especially as we grew. We had aging equipment. Then AWS came into existence. It was really the right time for us to make that decision to switch over to the cloud.

ACT News:  What does your IT strategy mean for your clients? 

Brent:  Clients notice our technology right away. We have automated the vast majority of our commercial applications. We now are implementing an online, automated renewal process that is easy for us and our clients. 

We used to give new clients a four-inch-thick binder full of documents. That was our gift to our clients. I was like, “What?!"

Now we have a portal online for all clients, “ABD Connect."  All practices use it to some degree. It is proving great for renewals, because now they can just log on and modify what has changed. We and they don't have to go through a whole questionnaire process. We have a dedicated product manager who focuses on ABD Connect. She gets feedback from our team or the support desk and works on those needs to make it more and more responsive.

One of the really great things ABD Connect brings for clients is the ability for them to glean important data electronically. This includes what coverage they have, what their employee benefits profile looks like, how much they are spending. They can see their whole portfolio in one spot, and this is true for our international clients as well. They can now slice and dice their own data to answer their own risk management and budgeting questions using that portal. That really empowers them to use their data in a way that would have taken a ridiculous amount of time using paper.

ACT News:  You wear many hats, including chair of NetVU. How does that role and your years of involvement in the tech community help you be a better strategic technology leader at ABD? 

Brent:  Working at an insurer, I started seeing the value of the further education available and began adding certifications—CLU, CPCU, RHU, REBC, etc. I figured those would benefit me throughout my career. That has really helped round out my knowledge, which helps me see tech needs from a lot of different angles.

I think having that broader experience has really benefited me. There are great tech people outside insurance and great insurance people who are trying to learn technology. I've been able to combine those two realms, which has been advantageous to me and, I would say, to the firm and groups I work with. NetVU is a good example of where that crossover experience is good. I have had some great opportunities to be a bridge between carriers, brokers and techies. I love sharing what I know and learning from others, so it's good all around.

ACT News:  What do you say to those who think, “Well, Brent came in at a good time with a new firm where there was a lot of great timing"? 

Brent:  That's true in many ways, but there's nothing stopping others from doing what we have done at ABD. Sometimes people cling to a comfort level in keeping what they have. But soon enough things will change so they grow uncomfortable with that setup. You know, in many ways, the InsurTech movement—the guys that are just starting out or coming up with new ways to use technology in the industry—is really forcing legacy firms to move forward. That is a positive thing. Look at how these InsurTechs are pushing our agency management systems forward. A lot of the developments have been in response to innovations that might look like threats to some in the insurance industry.

Applied did something kind of interesting with the introduction of Epic. They went to the users and demonstrated what the new capabilities were in their systems, basically saying, “Look how much fun this management system is to use!" The users started demanding those things, and the agency principals heard the message loud and clear. Vertafore is doing much of the same, and they have taken integration to a whole new level. We should see some really great capabilities in agency management systems going forward.

ACT News:  Before we wrap up, would you give us the benefit of your wide-lens perspective on the challenges agents and our industry need to solve? 

Brent:  There are several, but I would say the top two are security and our perception as a low-tech field.

Security is such a huge problem. The hackers are really effective with easy-access methods.

ACT News:  They don't have to be backroom coding geniuses. 

Brent:  Right. They just need to send an email that has a link that gives them access to a key door into a system. That's pretty easy because people are busy, they get a lot of emails, and it's not always apparent that a request you receive to do maintenance or some other function, like “It's time to change your password. Click here for instructions," isn't really from Microsoft. Once you click the link, you've given them access, and you find out when other people are getting emails from you that you didn't send.

We recently installed Barracuda, an email security product, that verifies incoming and outgoing emails before they are delivered. It is worth every dime.

On the perception issue, I'll tell you, it's easy in this industry to stand out if you do tech right. We've made that choice to maximize what we can do for our clients and staff with technology.  I've also learned the importance of change management, end-user adoption, partnering with the business practices and understanding that change is best when everyone understands why we are changing.