AgBridge is a tool for letting the food producer talk to insurance professionals to get an accurate rate. The application translates between the two sides of the market. The pitch was that the insurance companies that purchase the use of this app from us get to brand the app and push it to customers as a sales and retention tool. This application received an overwhelmingly positive response from a very interested market when the idea was created and pitched at the 2015 Engler 3DS (3 Day Startup) Startup Experience hosted by the ENGLER AGRIBUSINESS ENTREPRENEURSHIP PROGRAM AT UNL
Agriculture insurance is a complex topic that has significant impact in food production, but not optimized. There was a deep dissatisfaction with the current state of agriculture insurance on the part of both the insurers and the agriculture community. We spoke with a number of insurance agents, farm bureaus, farmers and ranchers, truckers, processing and storage, etc. To get a feel for where the breakdown occurred. One of the most recently mentioned issues was the fundamental misunderstanding of risk management in the agricultural community; the people who write insurance policies do not understand the commonplace risks or rewards in agriculture leading to a breakdown in actuarial science. A large number of agriculture focused insurance agents only stay with Farm Bureaus for as long as they have to, resulting in a brain drain away from the agriculture industry. This lack of Industry awareness and constant turnover leads to higher premiums because the agents can't properly assess or communicate the risk management inherent to the agricultural industry. By providing a translation where agents can be educated by the agricultural community to better understand the world are working in. It also helps bring Insurance to the agricultural community and helps them understand how to better mitigate risk.
Without a proper understanding of each other, the agent is likely to give the farmer the wrong rate which is a loss for both. An application is not a magical cure-all, it will just give the ability to communicate. The screens here are limited as in the prototype, when you log in and create or view policies, it will look slightly different whether food producer or agent. You log in and get a dashboard customized to you assets and policy. You get a simple profile view. You have the ability to communicate between the actuarial science's side and the agricultural community's side.
The immediate steps were to finish designing and developing the application and take it to testing with insurance and ag production entrepreneurs or partner with a Farm Bureau for a pilot project. The team I worked on had former and current farm bureau insurance member express interest and even mentors expressing an interest in investment as we ran the startup through the lean methodology – the idea resonated with Ag students and their parents as well with the the Accountants and insurance agents who came to see us pitch. Unfortunately, despite the overwhelming interest in the idea, due to the pressures of school and work, we had to shelve the business. The team that created this still stays in contact with their fellow entrepreneurs, and are considering spinning up the idea after school having already developed the business strategy and made industry contacts.
The farm bureau or insurance provider that purchase the use of our application would be able to brand it as their own, so much of the Visual identity had be neutral to the point of blandness.
The biggest issue faced when designing interface was that the devices most likely to display information be older computers or Mobile devices. Context is an important condition of usage and the initial user research indicated that people be more likely to use it on the go or in a designated Home office not as focused on technology.
One of the larger considerations was with her not to add the social connectivity, but since the entire model could only be helped by communication, and other industry leaders in auto and home insurance proved social integration was an important feature, we opted to include a social login.
This particular screen would be from the consumer's perspective. And it the consumer learns how to phrase their assets in a way that the industry understands. Because is inherently translation app that helps contextualize actuarial information in agricultural terminology, much of it would be dependent upon both of their lexicons.
The focus is definitely on co-creation, or making it a collaborative effort when working through insurance.
This is the primary informational view of the app. It is a index of all the available information in a co-created listing. For the technical action, actuarial details be found after up it offers the human-to-human interface and just like the policies should be created let me fool contributions of those sites. One of the issues is the members of the agricultural community merely take their business elsewhere, contact through a Farm Bureau, or even avoid insurance altogether instead of trying to create a mutual understanding with their agents. Providing a listing like this helps get everyone on the same page, metaphorically.
This comprehensive index was one of the things that the producers asked for the most, due to the often fragmented nature of their business.
Insurance is often seen as something that only enters the picture when some some disaster has happened. One of the things that the insurance agents wanted to communicate was that they were there to help protect people from, not just clean up after, the disaster.
One of the nice things about having this chat format is that you can reference back to specific policies or bring up very fundamental technical issues and be able to access their meaning at anytime. It was designed to sort of be a conversational wiki that helps engage customers.
This conversation is just one example of communication between an insurance agent and a farmer-rancher, when we interviewed both parties who would be involved in this kind of dialog, we found that most the conversations would progress like this: there's a need for information, and some sort of log or citation of the information provided so that when disaster did strike, both sides understood where everything was at, and wouldn't have to wait for the panic of the moment to sort things out.
