Doug Benalan Qorus-NTT DATA Innovation in Insurance Awards 2026

Doug’s most significant achievement was the ground-up architecture of an enterprise-wide policy, claims, and billing ecosystem leveraging Guidewire. This wasn't just a backend overhaul; he designed a fully integrated, customer-facing sales and service portal built on a foundation of Open APIs and microservices. While industry peers often spend years on similar transformations, Doug delivered this multi-million-dollar initiative in just six months to coincide with CURE's Michigan expansion and then expanded to NJ and other states. This "speed-to-market" strategy integrating Genesys IVR and advanced agency solutions wasn't just efficient; it was transformative. Under his leadership, CURE’s Gross Written Premium increased 5 times within 4 years. Doug pioneered a Unified Data Intelligence Hub by architecting a hybrid AWS Redshift and Snowflake environment. This transition transformed CURE’s operations from reactive to proactive; by synthesizing high-velocity metrics across premiums, claims, and customer friction points into a real-time executive dashboard, Doug empowered leadership to identify and remediate system anomalies before they impacted the policyholder experience. Doug continues to push the boundaries of innovation by embedding Artificial Intelligence into the core of CURE's distribution model. Utilizing transformer models like RoBERTa and Bi-LSTM neural networks, he developed a system that allows customers to navigate complex Personal Injury Protection (PIP) options entirely online. Furthermore, Doug championed the deployment of an AI Translation bot, ensuring that non-English speaking customers are serviced promptly and equitably. This focus on accessibility has led to a 35% increase in positive customer sentiment. By streamlining data integrations and automating communication, Doug has: Reduced operational costs and time-on-task by 35%. Improved inter-departmental collaboration by 30%. Eliminated the friction of manual phone calls that Tier-1 competitors still require, saving customers effort by 25% Customer base quadrupled within 3 years