One80 Intermediaries | Keeping American Families Safe | Martin Burlingame

Leading & Adapting

Martin Burlingame is the National Con-tract Binding Authority Practice Leader for One80 Intermediaries. He leads a team that places property, liability, package, and management liability across 30+ carriers in the binding authority marketplace.

“We built our own platform that connects to all the different flood carriers and provides viable indications and quotes in real time to agents depending on the risk and carrier appetite,” he says.

 “We focus directly on access for the agent to the carriers, facilitating a bindable quote that pops up on their screen in real time,” says Burlingame. “It provides a line of business that doesn’t typically offer multi-carrier bindable options, he continued.”

Previously Martin was the CEO of Big-foot Insurance, which was purchased by One80 Intermediaries as part of their InsurTech strategy.  Bigfoot Insurance, now branded Access One80, is an online MGA platform which processes submissions for over 15,000 agents across the U.S.  Prior to joining the insurance industry, Martin served in the US Army as an Armor and Intelligence Officer with a combat tour in Mogadishu, Somalia.  With over 10 years of experience in the InsurTech space, Martin has extensive knowledge around launching and scaling innovative platforms. He supports a culture of innovation and entrepreneurial spirit, allowing his employees to create marketing-leading products to serve the brokers. 

Embracing New Challenges

Noah Flood was deployed in Q2 2022, and  garnered 100,000 unique internet visitors per month in just eight weeks. To date, the platform has helped thou-sands of brokers navigate the complexity of flood insurance, optimizing the pricing model in real-time, saving hours by not having to access multiple search engines and systems. 

Noah Flood currently represents nine different carriers and plans to  expand in the future. The platform appeals to their carrier partners as it is designed to streamline the quoting process. The proprietary platform integrates Surefyre as the front-end CRM, ePay as the payment option, and nine different flood carriers with various APIs to provide the most comprehensive solutions for flood insurance.

Coverage is available in all states, and products include Private Flood, Excess Flood, Commercial Flood, and Condominium Flood. The platform links directly to the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP). The solution has been deployed to retail agents and networks across the country.

Towards the Future

Since One80’s inception, InsurTech has been a powerful driver through-out our culture. Their team leverages (AI)-based predictive analytics and risk assessment capabilities that in-troduce new data sources. “We also use InsurTech to address distribution, influence telematics, pursue unserved niche markets, and offer competitive pricing and market-leading services,” says Martin. “Given these unique features, Noah Flood submissions are up by 32% year over year, new business is up by 30% year over year, and gross written premium is up 61%.” 

In 2009 Martin launched a tech-driven start-up, Bigfoot Insurance, which One80 Intermediaries then acquired. This online MGA platform manages submissions for over 15,000 agents across the US and focuses on innovation, cyber threats, changing consumer behavior, and new market entrants. Building upon this experience and distribution channel, Martin and his team-built Noah Flood as an all-inclusive flood platform for retail agents to support their customers.

“We plan to invest and continue on this roadmap leading the market as customer needs evolve,” says Martin. “More specifically, in 2022 we stream-lined the application process multiple times to ensure the smoothest UX, removed redundancies and tweaked APIs to speed the process. Further, the average submission time or flow-through business was 7 minutes in 2022, down from 9 in 2021.”