About two years ago, IMA Financial Group began laying the foundation for a deep operational overhaul. The goal was straightforward: define what it means to be the “broker of the future”. The path, however, has been anything but simple.
“About 24 months ago we started down a formal process of digital transformation with consultants to understand what we needed to know to be what we call the broker of the future,” said Garrett Droege (pictured), SVP and director of innovation and digital risk at IMA.
Droege went into the process with a clear hypothesis. “I believed the client experience is relatively undifferentiated, which I find to be a symptom of most insurance brokerages,” he said. “Everyone likes to think they have this killer secret IP... but from a client standpoint, it looks and feels pretty similar most of the time.”
But client experience was only half of the problem. Droege pointed to internal inefficiencies as a second structural flaw: “We have, as an industry, made our associates' daily lives kind of hellish with technology.” The real problem wasn’t a lack of innovation - it was the disconnected tech stack.
“If a workflow involves 15 pieces of technology that the user has to know how to navigate themselves... it’s a broken workflow,” he said. “You're asking people to navigate between, for instance, our data and analytics platform for the energy sector, then go and get cyber data analytics... It's just a terrible process.”
Droege’s suspicions were confirmed when consultants returned with the same two critical findings: client experience and associate workflow were the areas most in need of attention. From there, the roadmap took shape.
Two core groups emerged as transformation leads: the IT department under the CIO, and IMA Labs, the company’s internal innovation group. “Those two lead pretty much every effort if it's involved in the actual delivery of insurance products and services to our clients or trading partners,” Droege said.
IMA took a pragmatic, ground-up approach to technology selection, leveraging its unique position as a co-owner of the insurtech accelerator BrokerTech Ventures.
“We see hundreds of companies every year that are building solutions to solve all of our problems,” Droege said. From that pool, around a dozen go through the accelerator, and IMA typically pilots six to 10 of them each year in proof-of-concept (POC) trials.
“I think you need to run as many POCs as you possibly can to get a better sense of what is, in fact, broken within your four walls,” he said. “The only way you actually get to that conclusion is having run the POC and realized that didn’t actually solve it the way we thought it would.”
These POCs are fast, deliberate, and include operational leaders from the start. “We put a lot of emphasis on figuring out who the ultimate best business unit or operators will be of this platform and involve them from day one,” Droege said. “It virtually eliminates change management as this big scary boogeyman... The team actually asked for this.”
With AI dominating industry conversations, Droege acknowledged the internal pressure to deliver AI-driven results - though the ask is often vague.
“Everyone believes that they need more AI and that other people have more and better AI... but if you actually start asking what they mean by that, most people can't answer you,” he said.
To manage the volume of requests, IMA created an internal Technology Advisory Group (TAG), which filters proposals from all business units. Before anything reaches TAG, teams must secure local leadership support and articulate the intended business value.
“If you're asking for AI assistance... you need to sell that to your local leadership and get their executive sponsorship before you bring that to TAG,” Droege said.
IMA’s position on AI is firm. “I’m not a fan of AI replacing humans, full stop. However, I’m a huge fan of AI augmenting humans,” he said. The expectation is clear: any AI investment must show tangible return in either operational efficiency or hiring offset.
“If we do invest in one, where can we find that same amount of investment in potential human capital that might be in an open position somewhere?” he said. “At some point, the math just stops working.”
Despite the scale of the transformation, Droege believes the most powerful tool has been communication - not just change management theory.
“People should not be hearing different stories from different people,” Droege said. “If you just let people know - this is why we’re investing in this... it changes the conversation completely.”
