October 10, 2025 | 12:41
Dani: This is Trust Talks, an Insuretech Insights podcast hosted by Clearspeed. I'm your host, Dani Ng-See Quan. We're asking senior insurance leaders for their perspectives on why trust is critical today and for their real -time views on what's happening in the industry. Today, we're kicking off with Joey Daryanani, the VP of Specialized Services at CSAA, a role in which he oversees both internal and external insurance operations. Joey has 40 years of experience in P&C insurance and has built his decades -long career at CSAA. Joey, welcome. Thank you for being here.
Joey: Danny, thanks for having me.
Dani: I'm going to start with the 40 years you've spent in insurance. You've seen many cycles of change? How have you reinvented yourself?
Joey: Yeah, great question. So 1985, fresh out of college. I joined the organization as a frontline claims adjuster and held numerous positions within the claims department all the way up to this thing called pandemic in 2020. And at that time, you might recall that innovation was a big buzzword. How do we innovate and what were the challenges we had and all of that? And during the pandemic, we ran an innovation challenge and the question was, how can we innovate despite this thing called the pandemic? There was an employee that suggested we get into the contact tracing business and my phone line. It was our COO Bob Ballier and he said, Joey, would you explore this idea? It seems pretty crazy. And frankly, I'm talking to him, and I don't even know what contact tracing is. I'm googling contact tracing. And I figured it out soon after. And I said, you know, this is a possibility. We're good investigators in the claims organization. We capture notes really well. We know the medical field, and we have the trust of the community. So let's go and do it. Then the next question was, well, how much do we charge? Well, I have no idea. So how about we started at $23 an hour? And we were using claims folks to go do this so that we don't lay people off. That was just one example. We grew a startup organization within CSAA. It went from zero to $55 million in the bank today. At one point, we were the call center for the entire state of Nevada that handled contact tracing and vaccine support and those types of things. And it wasn't insurance related at all. It completely aligned with how we operate in the communities that we serve. That was just one example. We go from that too, okay, this is going to end soon, Joey, What's your plan? And an immediate pivot around we can be a third party administrator. We're great at claims, why wouldn't I offer those services publicly? So that was another pivot, right? So reinventing myself sort of has become the thing. And we've said that if you don't change, change will go after you and eventually eat you alive. And I've been able to be lucky enough to work for an organization that absolutely supports ideas like this and gives us the opportunity and the environment to play.
Dani: I love that Joey and maybe an added question is it does take a certain mindset. I would say to you know take those leaps of faith in some cases or pivot I mean you know especially if you're jumping on a problem that's not directly related to what you've been doing.
Joey: There's two things that I think about when I open my mind up to things like this. And you will recognize the type of individual and I will describe it to you. To me, there are two types of individuals in the world that you run into. One that will go right to why we can't. And there are a hundred reasons why we can't. And frankly, a second grader can give me that. The other type of individual is how can we? If you open your mind to the “how can we “ question, that is what gets me motivated and challenged to do the next best thing. And once you develop your employees to be thinking along those lines in your teams, to me it now becomes second nature where they're like, all right, what are we doing next? and it gets them energized and motivated to do something different every day.
Dani: So then let's take the how can we Yeah, and and bring it into what's going on in insurance today, insurance is a for -profit industry it is but where do you see money being left on the table? And what can be done to address that you know?
Joey: It's a very unique time in the insurance industry and while people that are not in the business believe that we are making hands over fifth. That is simply not the case. So if you end with a combined ratio of 97, 98, 99, it's a great year. Everybody's celebrating. That just hasn't been the case lately. So in 2023, unfortunately, we had to pull out over $600 million from surplus that we ended up using for the business and running it out of control. It still is because inflation and other things like not that this would ever happen, the legal system abuses those types of things right. Especially with a mutual company they say that when you start to die it's a very slow death and many times you don't feel it. So, leaving money on the table, especially with expenses, drives me absolutely crazy. Now more than ever, as we've raised rates, I believe we can't continue to do that for our policy holders, and we are, or should be the best stewards of their money. And in that regard, as we think about the next dollar that we spend, we have to make sure that that is absolutely the right thing to do.
Dani: Yes, absolutely. So then thinking about the focus of this conversation and trust, how, you know, where does trust fit into this equation? You know, how is it impacting? How is it impacted on the consumer side, but also, you know, on the insurer side?
Joey: I feel that we're very fortunate. We're a member based organization. So trust is there for the triple A brand. But in general, consumers are less trusting of the insurance company. Unfortunately, the plaintiff bar has done a very good job, in my opinion, with the advertising and the talking about how bad insurance companies are, and how they low ball and sort of that sort of thing. And I'm sure they're all good as well. However, we don't sit here and come up with a dollar amount to settle a claim that we pull out of the sky. We are required by the regulatory sort of emissions that we've got to make sure that we offer in good faith. And the other side certainly doesn't have to do that. So we have to build back trust. - You might ask, all right, how do we start, right? We've sort of fallen back year over year for at least five years that I know of where the plaintiff bars in a fabulous job rallying together, sharing data, doing all of those things while we sit here and talk about antitrust. We have to read antitrust language when insurance companies meet. I think we've just missed them. Let's maybe start with talking about how we reduce rates? And that's not even a topic yet because we are taking rates so rapidly right now that I think it's time to pause and say, how do we, when do we, right? So we've gotten really good at identifying, all right, we've got to raise rates here shortly, I think that language needs to permeate around how do we cut rates? Let's start there around building the trust back up, and being open and honest when we communicate with our policy holders.
Dani: And it's interesting building the trust back up with consumers.There's also a need I feel for insurers to Put some trust in their customers and that can be challenging if you're in a situation where fraud is prevalent For example, so how can you better trust consumers who you are working with when, you know, in this case, you're kind of like, "Oh, gotta check every single claim just to make sure." And that, you know, has a negative impact on the experience.
Dani: That's right. Yeah, and, you know, for years, when I talked to a new hire class, everybody's all excited about the fraud component of it. And while fraud exists, it's important that as we develop our newer hires, they don't think about the fraud aspect while they need to be sort of evaluating what they have in front of them. The advantage now is emerging technology. Every vendor I talked to talks about AI. It almost seems like you can't all be doing AI, right? But that's sort of the sexy buzzword lately. I love the fact that we are starting to approach AI has a tool that'll help us evaluate our claims inventory 24 by step and give you the next best action on every single claim. And if it's fraud, then it's fraud. If it's a buildup, which I'm seeing more and more around legal system abuse, you know, while I don't like that, I also think that most of the time those claimants are victims themselves. When we have bad players actually doing surgery on claimants that were involved in an accident but may not need that surgery. They're victims and while they collect some money, they collect money after everybody else and the claim gets paid. including the person that does transcriptions on depositions they do it you know without actually getting paid upfront everything is contingent what happens to that claimant at the end whether when they end up with a bunch of medical bills and very little money that they settle their claim way they too are victims
Dani: absolutely and it's interesting you know it's a great point Joey and Mindy from Mutual of Omaha said yesterday you know insurers have to stop building solutions for insurers and build them for the customers or the claimant and that's an example too like where does the claimant fit in all of this. So to close this out I want to go back to how we can and ask you the big hairy question you know if there is a big takeaway or something you would share with the folks in the industry listening to things they should be thinking about or something they should do right now. What would that be?
Joey: Yeah, I think you said it earlier. I would start with building trust. I talked about the various ways we can do that. That's how I would start. I would be careful about money that's left on the table. I would communicate more openly with policyholders and explain “the why”. And very few carriers really think about that as being something they would lead with, but rather they would answer with once they get that question. And I would really think about the right cases to try. Let's take some of these cases to trial, especially when we feel that there's a network of bad players in the background that might be financing the case or what have, right? It should no longer be about what is the win rate versus the offer rate in certain cases where it's the right case you might invest in there and start deposing bad actors and start to expose them. That is one way we start to build trust back up with the defendant who's your policy firm.
Dani: excellent Joey we're gonna leave it there Thank you so much for being here.
Joey: Thanks for having me again.