Company Overview
Jon Kelly is Co-Founder & CEO of Modern Metric, modern software for insurance advisors. Learn more at www.modernmetric.com.
Can you tell us a little about your background before starting at your company?
I started in insurance with Mercer Management Consulting in the mid-90s, right out of Stanford. It was a great way to learn the industry, working cases with Prudential, CNA, and Fireman’s Fund. After a brief stint at Oracle, I co-founded a SoftBank/Accel-backed dotcom called eCoverage. Everyone thought we were nuts, but we built a full-stack MGA in about a year (in the 90s!) and became the first startup to sell car insurance online in the US. After that I co-founded the insurance ad network Surehits, ran the insurance division of QuinStreet, and then co-founded a HNW startup broker, Kelly Klee.
How did you start at your company? What were the first steps you took to get it off the ground and how did you identify the need for your product/service in the market?
Modern Metric is actually a spin-out of Kelly Klee. When we were building Kelly Klee, we found huge gaps in available agency software. The agency management systems and CRMs weren’t built to gather and manage all of the data HNW personal lines requires, so a lot of it ended up in Word, Excel, or email. There also wasn’t a good way to manage the complex private client workflow. We built what became our flagship product, Discover, as a unified platform that handles the full client onboarding process end to end and the same for renewals. Later we built a killer mobile app for clients, mostly because I wanted one for myself!
What innovations or unique features set your company apart from others in the industry?
We’re the only ones dedicated solely to HNW personal lines, so we’ve built a whole set of tools just for this market. I have no doubt our AI tools have ingested far more HNW documents (dec pages, valuables schedules, and so on) than anyone, tens of thousands of them. Discover fully manages the carrier marketing process, which matters a lot in HNW since that process can be long and complex. We also generate beautiful, very detailed branded proposals instantly, no AI involved, saving our clients hours of work.
Our mobile app is the only one built from the ground up for HNW consumers, and you can see the difference in the design. It’s not just the aesthetics. The functionality is tuned to simplify the complexity of these accounts and, most important, to connect clients to their brokers.
What has been the most effective strategy for scaling your business?
We’ve scaled on relationships. We’ve been in this business a long time. I got my first exposure to Private Client with Fireman’s Fund back in the 90s. We get out there, talk to people, and let them know that we’ve built a suite of tools made specifically to supercharge HNW personal lines advisors.
Looking ahead, what are your goals for the future of your company?
We keep enhancing the functionality and right now we’re laser-focused on carrier integrations. We’ve integrated all four lines of business (Home, Auto, Collections, Umbrella) with Cincinnati, and we’re working through the other private client carriers. We’re also bringing more AI analysis into the platform. So far, our AI tools have centered on document ingestion, but our new tools are doing a lot more on the analysis side. One tool looks at a carrier’s underwriting guidelines and evaluates whether an account is worth submitting. Another reviews the client proposal and flags things the advisor may have missed. We find that having a single, all encompassing platform for HNW advisors, is a lot more valuable than a bunch of point solutions.
