Dillon Roher spent years honing his web analytics skills in Silicon Valley before returning home to Kansas City to work for his uncle at Lee’s Summit-based Apollo Insurance Group Inc.
Apollo Insurance is one of the Kansas City area’s fastest-growing companies, with average revenue growth of 49.43% during the past three years. Founded in 2010, the company has grown to $7.37 million in 2020 revenue and about 80 agents with offices in Chicago, Overland Park and Lee’s Summit. But that’s far smaller than the companies Roher has been working for.
Before Apollo, Roher was senior analytics consultant for U.S. Bank in San Francisco. His also spent time in Silicon Valley working as an analytics consultant at Apple, lead consultant for Virtusa and web analytics consultant for American Funds. He worked in digital analytics at Sprint Corp. in Overland Park, as an analytics strategist for Lexmark Enterprise Software in Lexington, Kentucky, and as an analytics implementation developer for Intouch Solutions in Overland Park.
“I grew up in Kansas City, but I was never going to get the tools and the career experience that would have put me in a place to build the team that I have now to implement artificial intelligence or machine learning,” Roher said. “My experience in Silicon Valley was crucial for me to understand how all these pieces fit together and kind of envision how I can help my family company do things that aren’t happening in insurance and that no one is thinking about. I really want to make a difference in this industry because if there are any industries in the United State that need change, it’s health care and insurance. In every other industry, technology has already changed the game. But insurance is conservative, so technology has been slower there.”
Roher joined Apollo as chief technology officer in October 2020 and hit the ground running. The company just launched a new health insurance enrollment platform called My Aspire Quotes. The platform allows Apollo’s insurance agents to create their personalized link with their picture and biography on it as a place to send clients to fill out information and find the health, dental and vision insurance that best fits their needs and budget. Apollo is an insurance broker, so it can choose policies from a wide variety of providers.
“Our agents can do some self-marketing there,” Roher said. “In the world of insurance agents, there are a lot of referral meetings. There’s a lot of handing out of business cards and that sort of thing. But rather than handing out a business card, why not just send someone this link, whether it be in a text message or a LinkedIn chat? Then you can actually let your clients shop. It’s something other brokers don’t have, and it’s really the most sophisticated futuristic business card.”
The plan for My Aspire Quotes is to open it to the public in the future, to let clients find an agent or directly buy insurance. Although Roher is developing versions that use artificial intelligence and machine learning to help identify trends in purchasing and match the right policies with the right people, he doesn’t even plan to eliminate the human touch.
“It can get really complicated for people who have financial limitations or pre-existing conditions,” Roher said. “When we developed this platform, building communication tools was a priority. It was never just about adding artificial intelligence and machine learning to create a giant robot where you input your information and it spits out an insurance plan. While we want it to be the most intelligent, sophisticated platform out there, we definitely want to keep the human aspect of it very much involved and available to users.”
