Clients, partners, and friends: We are thrilled to announce that we've updated our web address, and newfrontinsurance.com is now newfront.com! 

It took us almost a year to acquire the domain, and we got to announce the news (and celebrate!) at our January Broker Summit in San Francisco. Here's our Co-founder and CTO Gordon Wintrob making it official: 

This update means both our website URL and email addresses will change, but rest assured that everything about the way we serve our clients will stay the same.   If you are a user of the Newfront dashboard, you'll log in and use the tools the same way you always have. And our @newfrontinsurance.com email addresses will still work; you will just see replies coming back from @newfront.com.   

We're also excited to share that in conjunction with our new URL, we launched a brand new website! We’ve updated our design to make it even easier to learn about our company and connect with our team. Of course, if you are here on our blog, you'll have already noticed, but if you have not done so, click through to Newfront.com, explore, and let us know what you think!

Amidst all these changes, we want to remind you that we're here to assist with all your risk management needs and we wish you health, happiness, and prosperity in 2020!

We are thrilled to announce that we've updated our web address to Newfront.com and redesigned our website!

Mike Riggs joined Newfront in 2018 after spending much of his career at Aon and Lockton. Recently, we sat down and chatted about getting his start in the family agency, how risk management can help shape business strategy, and why Newfront is the right brokerage for his clients. Enjoy the interview, and thank you Mike!

Mike, tell us a bit about yourself and how you got started in insurance.

I started out running the personal lines desk at my family’s agency in Fresno, and eventually got wheels under myself enough to become a producer. At that point, my dad and uncle said, “Here’s a phone and a phonebook—go do this.” Even back then, I knew there was a better way. And I’ve spent my whole career trying to build that better way.

My family ran a good business but it was small; a main street type of shop. After a few years I wanted to do a little bit more and looked to make a move. Since then, I’ve worked at Aon, Lockton and now Newfront.

My complete focus is the food & agribusiness industries. I started with grocery stores and worked my way along the food supply chain back to the grower. When I worked in Salinas, many of my clients were farmers and food processors, especially row crops like lettuce and spinach. Because I have clients throughout agribusiness, I can now help them think through risk across their entire enterprise.

How did you develop your expertise in risk management?

I earned my degree from Fresno State in Risk Management and Insurance. When I joined AON they were the world’s largest insurance broker. I was able to gain experience working on large complex accounts, helping my clients mitigate risk. That's when I really began to develop a passion for risk management. I learned that I could not only save clients money on their insurance spend, but also increase the value of their firm significantly.

Tell me about your transition to Newfront.

I had just left Lockon, the world’s largest independently owned insurance brokerage and was looking for the right agency to team up with or build my own practice. I couldn't help but notice the rapid growth of Newfront. Once I learned what Newfront was doing, I fell in love. I saw the ability for me to provide all the traditional insurance services while also offering enterprise-level risk management to my clients. Lockton served giant companies very well, but I wanted to give that high-level of service to small and medium-sized businesses where I am from in the San Joaquin Valley.

In an agency, I look for the support I need so that I can deliver highly tailored risk management services. If the brokerage works well and efficiently, then I deliver a lot more to my clients than just insurance. When I was looking for the right brokerage that would match my style and ambition, Newfront was a great fit: their platform, their approach and their attitude.

What’s different about Newfront for Producers?

Newfront’s technology and proactive approach make us so good and so efficient at doing the nitty-gritty insurance work. That means we can spend our resources and time helping our clients lower the total cost of risk and the total exposure to risk. With Newfront, the basic processing of policies and the information gathering phase happens very quickly. There’s one single place brokers and clients can log into that has all of their documents, all their claims information, and everything we need to manage their insurance program. Lots of routine things are automated.

Not only are we modernizing these processes, but we’re tying them all together in a holistic way. Newfront is setting the standard for excellent brokerage services, and I’m freed up to do the rest of the work and provide better value to the client.

I’m excited to bring more producers into the Newfront family. One of the biggest challenges in the insurance industry is that historically we don’t really train or make producers; they develop slowly or are just born into the industry. I want to change that. I want to train producers and set them up well to build a modern, forward-thinking and service-driven insurance industry.

We look forward to partnering with you on that! Thanks Mike.

Newfront Insurance is a retail brokerage in California. We’re always looking for great people to join our team. Feel free to reach out directly at (415) 754–3635 or email us: contact@newfront.com.

Meet Mike Riggs, Principal at Newfront Insurance

At Newfront, “Product” is the bridge between our engineering team and the rest of the business. As Head of Product, Josh works to understand what our brokers, account managers, and clients need and translates those needs into features we can build into our agency management platform.

Our mission is to empower brokers to better serve their clients, and our technology is one way we deliver on that goal.

What’s your background, and why join Newfront?

Originally I’m from academia. I have a Ph.D. from UC San Diego where I studied machine learning, and before joining Newfront I worked at a couple of enterprise AI companies — most recently Alpine Data where I was VP of Product.

After Alpine was acquired, I was looking for a really meaty domain where technology and data science could be applied to great impact. When I met our founders Gordon and Spike, I became convinced that insurance was exactly the kind of problem domain I was looking for. It also helped that I was immediately impressed by their professionalism and the amount they had accomplished in a very short time. I could tell that even in its early state Newfront had momentum and a unique perspective on the industry.

We’re building an agency management platform for three main constituencies: our clients, our account managers, and our brokers. Ultimately this platform will allow us to be much more operationally efficient than a traditional brokerage while delighting our clients and brokers with the modern software quality and usability we’ve all come to expect.

What are some specific uses of the platform?

For clients we make common insurance tasks simple — things like understanding your coverage, tracking claims, and managing certificates of insurance. We also greatly improve the renewal process by storing and reusing client info across applications.

For account managers (AMs) we automate away busywork like filling out ACORD forms and certificates so that they can focus on high-value activities like client interactions and marketing complex risks.

For brokers, we provide a holistic view of their book, including automated tracking of all actions that the AMs and their clients take. We also make it easy for them to submit new business and collect the basic information we need to start marketing a risk. Lastly, we give them access to cutting edge client acquisition tools.

Tell me about the tech team’s workflow.

As a team, we’re very focused on how we can help the rest of the company. Exciting problems for us are not necessarily the intellectually challenging ones (though we run into plenty of those), but rather those that result in a significant improvement in day-to-day experience for our clients or brokers.

Our team is divided into "product pods" where each pod is composed of a product manager, a designer, and several engineers. The pods are independent and implement features from conception to completion. We also have a core technology team that works on deployment, telemetry, continuous integration, testing frameworks, and other team-wide concerns. All our groups work on a weekly sprint cycle, and most days we have multiple production releases.

How does Newfront think about technology?

In keeping with our mission to empower our clients and brokers, we believe our technology should be built-in service to the people here. Some companies are technology-driven — these companies and their markets exist because of a novel technology. The insurance market has existed for a long time without us and there are hundreds of successful brokerages. What we’re doing is fundamentally shifting the economics of being a brokerage by building best-in-class technology, again in service of empowering our people. This economic shift, enabled by a top-tier engineering organization and our startup mindset and drive, makes us unique in the industry.

How does Newfront’s approach differ from industry standards or other brokerages?

We have hundreds of years of insurance experience across our AM and broker teams, so we really are born from and part of this industry. However, we’re also a technology company, so we sit at a powerful intersection. Many of the technology companies in the insurance industry are trying to reduce the human component, and frankly, they may not fully understand its importance, the importance of the broker/client relationship and expert service from an experienced account manager. So we’re reinventing what it means to be a brokerage while following the same fundamental model and some of the best practices developed over many decades.

What has surprised you about the insurance industry?

I was kind of bracing for things to be a bit dry, but I’ve actually been blown away by how colorful and dynamic the people in this industry are. Part of what I love about this job is just getting the chance to hang out and chat with the brokers and AMs as I learn more about insurance.

Any major goals your team is currently working on?

We’re building out support for polished paper products, like summaries and proposals that you feel proud to hand off to a client. We’re also in the early stages of untangling the hairball that is billing in this industry. We think it’s an area where we’ll really be able to help save time and confusion for all parties. Long-term there’s a ton of exciting stuff we can do around automation, data science, and a converged experience for all our user constituencies.

Thanks, Josh. Can you leave us with any closing thoughts?

My PhD experience taught me that to tackle really big problems you have to decompose them and then take some first steps––even if you don’t have the full path to the solution mapped out. That experience is coming in handy in the vast, complex problem domain that is the insurance industry. Already we’ve taken some meaningful steps and cast some more light on the road ahead.

Building Newfront's Tech Platform: An Interview with Josh Lewis

Blog ‍

Connect ‍
with ‍
us. ‍

Articles from Benjamin Lotan

Announcing Our New URL and Website

Meet Mike Riggs, Principal at Newfront Insurance

Building Newfront's Tech Platform: An Interview with Josh Lewis

Newfront for Businesses

Newfront for Employee Benefits

Newfront for Private Clients

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Articles from Benjamin Lotan

.css-13o7eu2{display:block;}Announcing Our New URL and Website

Meet Mike Riggs, Principal at Newfront Insurance

Building Newfront's Tech Platform: An Interview with Josh Lewis

Newfront for Businesses

Newfront for Employee Benefits

Newfront for Private Clients

Blog ‍

Connect ‍
with ‍
us. ‍

Announcing Our New URL and Website