Who Is Reid French and Why Is He Saying Nice Things About Insurance?

Applied Systems’ new CEO Reid French is no stranger to technology, having worked for several software makers over the past 15 years. One job was with a company called Six Solutions that sold software for professional service organizations. Most recently he was CEO of an $840 million company called Intergraph, whose visualization and mapping programs are used by emergency responders, utilities and governments. “Ultimately, Intergraph was a visualization software company. Really what that means is that all of its software really related to a picture,” said French.

He thinks his experience dealing in markets outside the U.S. along with his experience serving large organizations — including the federal government — should come in handy. Applied Systems is looking to expand its footprint geographically and within the large broker market with Epic.

French said that while he lacks an insurance background, he thinks his experiences in other industries can be useful. “Certainly, there are experiences that I’ve had in other industries that I think I can see patterns in the insurance agency market, which hopefully will bring something to bear there,” he said. “However, I will say that one of the great things about Applied is that we have lots of deep domain experience around insurance. I think that’s part of the secret sauce of the company is that domain expertise. Our people know insurance very, very well. What I hope to add is a little bit of a fresh perspective around the development of software and where software companies can add value to their customers.”

‘Noble Thing’

French wants Applied Systems to stay true to its heritage of being insurance experts:

“I think at times people consider insurance to be pedestrian, or maybe a stronger word, even boring at times. I think the reality is, one of the things I did get excited around Applied for, insurance is a noble thing. It is not a pedestrian thing. It ultimately helps to protect people and their dreams and their assets and their loved ones in their darkest day.

“When you need that agent to help you with an insurance situation, it tends to be a pretty dark day. Something happened to your house, something happened to a loved one, something happened to a car. It’s not a great event.

“And I think one of the things that we will try to communicate more to both the marketplace and our customer base is that we recognize that what they’re doing is noble. And we want to make sure that our technology is helping them to carry out that mission to the best of their abilities, to server that customer on that dark day.

“I mentioned earlier that when I was at Intergraph, we did these public safety systems. One of the things I always used to say was that when something really happened the first call was to the loved ones and the second one was to 911. Well, guess what? In a lot of these instances, the third phone call is to the independent agent. We’ve got to always remember that. 90+ percent of the time, there’s never an issue, but that one time when there is, they really need their agent and their agent system to perform. We can never forget that as a company.”

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