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Wunderite Driving Independent Agents Toward ‘Google Maps’ Experience

Web-based app collects and centralizes data to streamline processing of insurance applications.
  • Meg Green
  • July 2021
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Wunderite App

Peter MacDonald wants searching for the best homeowners policy to be as easy as finding a location on Google maps. “If you type in your address, wouldn't it be great if we could prefill 150 data points? Flood zone, distance to the coast, elevation? All this data that agents and their customers don't know,” he said.

Peter MacDonald

Peter MacDonald

Joe Schnare

Joe Schnare

Wunderite, which MacDonald co-founded with Joe Schnare, developed a web-based app to collect and centralize this kind of information, to make it faster and easier for independent agents to help customers with property/casualty insurance options and applications. MacDonald spoke with AM Best TV about the platform that is only available at www.wunderite.com.

Following is an edited transcript of the interview.

What inspired you to create Wunderite?

A majority of insurance in this country, when sold for the first time or when it's renewed, begins its life on a yellow legal pad, an email, a PDF or an Excel spreadsheet. As a next-generation insurance salesperson … I knew there had to be a better and easier way.

I wanted to make it easier for agents, their customers, their carriers to fill out the paperwork.

Can you walk us through what Wunderite does?

Wunderite is an online platform for insurance agents to collect data about customers. We make it easy with a web form.

It's an easier, more intuitive workflow that bridges the digital divide, because we can still work with the industry-standard PDFs, but we're structuring the data in the background.

How does the system work?

We digitize insurance schedules and insurance applications. We prefill third-party data where we can, [and have the customer] fill out the last two or three questions that maybe we didn't know.

We wanted to make the experience more like what we have all become used to. We're all used to Google Maps, for example. You just type in an address, Google knows what we're searching for.

So it's a web app?

Yes. The end customer might only log on once or twice a year, if that much. They may not want an app installed on their iPhone. [This way] you get a text message, and there's a link. You click on the link and you can open Wunderite. It works out of the box on every device; you don't have to install anything.

If you're an insurance sales producer in the car in the parking lot of a prospect, you should be able to pull it up very quickly, find the information you need, refresh your memory on the account, and then go talk to the business owner or operator.


Meg Green is a senior associate editor. She can be reached at meg.green@ambest.com.



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