Hi, I’m Tom Gray, and I started Undercover Insurance to bring a little creativity to an important, but boring industry. Whether you’re considering buying insurance through us or are just reviewing information on the site, I thought a short bio might be helpful so you know you’re dealing with a reliable source.

 

I was “educated” at the University of Maryland at College Park and was awarded an undergraduate degree in Finance and later an MBA in Marketing. In my final year as an undergrad, I got an internship with GEICO Insurance, which began my foray into insurance. It was a great program because: a) you got paid about 4x as much as working in the school book store, b) you got scholarship money for school, and c) you got valuable work experience and exposure to senior management at the company.

 

After graduating with an undergrad degree, I stayed on to work full-time with GEICO. It was an interesting area for me because I worked in the department that set the rules for who GEICO would and wouldn’t insure and what rating classifications would apply (including discounts, surcharges, etc.). Being young and into cars, I focused a lot on reforming how they underwrote cars and changed the way they handled high-performance cars, collector cars, sport-utility vehicles, etc. Then, in the early ’90’s, they were seeking to broaden their market reach and turned to Fair, Isaac, and Co. (that’s right, think FICO score) to help build a scorecard-based underwriting system. I served as the business lead for this ground-breaking project, and my role included working with GEICO’s regional underwriting management to come up with the characteristics that would go into the scorecard as well as physically procuring the data that FICO would analyze. We ended up implementing a system that took much of the subjectivity out of underwriting auto insurance and allowed significant staffing/role changes to occur at GEICO.

 

From there, I took a break from underwriting and moved over to the Marketing department. What a great time to be in marketing, just after Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway took control of GEICO by buying the remaining 49% of the company he didn’t already own. Basically, the message was “step on the gas and don’t worry about capital”. This meant don’t worry about the capital to finance growth and NOT don’t worry about underwriting losses – GEICO remained a disciplined underwriter. In Marketing, I used my data analysis skills acquired over in Underwriting to look at prospects and customers in new ways. The biggest “a-ha” was that they were getting almost 3x as many people calling in the 25-35 year old age group as they were in their target market of 50-64 year olds. Based partly on my work there, the target changed, and the ads got cooler.

 

While in Marketing, I began work on my MBA at UMCP. This was during the time the Internet began to gain wide acceptance, and one of my class projects was to create a web site (remember Netscape? I still have their IPO prospectus!). I saw an interesting application of this technology – disseminating information internally at companies – and created a little “proof of concept” at GEICO. After a short trip to meet Bill Gates at Microsoft (GEICO was a “big-blue”, ie. IBM shop) by senior management (remember, Bill Gates and GEICO’s new owner, Warren Buffett are good friends), GEICO’s Intranet, DirectNet was born. They still call me the “Microsoft Poster Child” (and YTG – young Tom Gray) there to this day.

 

After my stint in the Marketing department, I went back to Underwriting to be part of the first Product Management team at GEICO.  Basically, a product manager is given P&L responsibility for a particular product and market, sets the strategy for achieving both profit and growth (hard to do consistently in insurance), and executes that strategy with the help of all the other functional areas of the company.  This proved to be a great opportunity to truly learn the mechanics of the insurance business and ended up leading me back full-circle to manage the group where I first interned at GEICO.  Back in my original group, I lead a version 2 of the score-based underwriting system now that we had a lot more data under our belt.

 

When version 2 of the underwriting model was finished, I transisitioned over to manage the e-service side of GEICO.com.  The idea was put someone with a good grasp of the business and a modicum of technical knowledge in the IT shop and see what happens.  I quickly found myself in the middle of a struggle between senior management, who wanted to move IT into more mainstream technology, and IT who definitely had different preferences when it came to the tools they liked to work with.  Nevertheless, it was a very effective team and we got an amazing amount of things done in the short time I was there.  To put things in perspective, in about a year and a half’s time, GEICO.com had gone from zero to processing about one-fifth of the company’s payments.

 

Then, shortly after the terrible tragedy of 9/11, I got a call from a former manager who had left GEICO to become President of the personal-lines insurance division at Safeco Insurance.  At the time, Safeco was bleeding money and looked like it may go out of business.  While GEICO was a well-oiled machine, it didn’t leave a lot of room for creativity.  Safeco, in it’s dire situation, offered the promise of more latitude.  So, I moved from Washington, DC to Seattle, WA and created a role that was an amalgamation of my prior roles at GEICO – a little Marketing Research, Direct Marketing, and Web Technology.  My overarching goal was to bring some of the techniques that made GEICO successful to the independent agents that represented Safeco.

 

While I achieved some success toward that goal, not every agent subscribed to the philosophy that not every customer was a good customer from them and that there were separate, distinct segments in the marketplace.  So, it was after seeing the low utilization of the tools we were producing to help agents direct-market insurance and sell online, that I decided I would try my hand at it and become an agent.  And that, folks, is how Undercover Insurance got it’s start.