Introduction

Carriers have core systems. Agents have CRMs. The broker sitting in the middle - managing corporate clients, chasing carrier proposals, and copy-pasting PDFs for twelve hours to build a single comparison - largely runs on email and Excel. Robert Koval has spent fifteen years building the platform that fixes that.

Koval is the COO of TeamBase, an insurtech founded in Dubai and now operating across the Middle East, Africa, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Europe, with the US market in its sights. TeamBase built two products from a single insight: that the broker's workflow - from customer portal to carrier comparison - is the most technologically underserved segment in the insurance value chain. In this conversation, Josh Hollander and Koval dig into how AI is collapsing the carrier proposal comparison from twelve hours to minutes, why going local beats going global in emerging insurance markets, and what the hardest leadership lesson is when you scale from two people to ten.

Guest Bio

Robert Koval is the COO of TeamBase, an insurtech platform serving brokers, carriers, and MGAs across the Middle East, Africa, Asia, and Europe. TeamBase was founded fifteen years ago in Dubai and operates two core products: BenefitNet, a policy management and customer self-service portal, and Quick Quote Hub, a quotation and carrier comparison platform. Koval runs product, operations, and AI strategy across a fully distributed team spanning India, Pakistan, Argentina, Ukraine, Czech Republic, Romania, and Ireland, with expansion into the US underway.

Key Topics

The broker is the most underserved link in the chain - Carriers have invested heavily in their own systems. Agencies have CRMs. The broker serving corporate clients is still emailing PDFs, building comparisons by hand, and managing policy additions through spreadsheets. That's the gap TeamBase was built to close.

Twelve hours of copy-paste, automated in minutes - When a broker asks multiple carriers to quote a corporate client, the resulting comparison process - opening four to six PDFs, extracting data, creating apples-to-apples tables - routinely takes twelve hours per proposal. TeamBase's AI ingests those proposals and produces the comparison automatically, freeing brokers to spend time on advice rather than data entry.

Local beats global in emerging markets - TeamBase made a deliberate choice not to build one globally standardized platform. Instead they fork and localize - building market-specific versions that can respond to local regulatory changes without touching the core. The trade-off is more maintenance, but clients in markets where regulations shift quickly respond far better to a locally adapted product.

AI is the next evolution, not a revolution - Koval frames AI as a continuation of the efficiency gains the industry has always chased. A platform refresh that would have required triple the code fifteen years ago is now achievable in a fraction of the time. For TeamBase, the immediate AI applications are in submission ingestion, carrier comparison automation, and QA testing - concrete ROI, not experiments.

Two developers and a great AI tool beats ten developers - Koval's view on team structure is blunt: AI changes the headcount math. The same output that required ten engineers now requires two with the right tools. That's not a threat to the team - it's a reallocation toward domain expertise and customer relationships.

Work on the business, not in it - Asked for one piece of advice to his fifteen-years-ago self, Koval lands on delegation. The transition from hands-on tech founder to trusting the first few people to carry real responsibility took longer than it should have, and cost focus and energy in the process. Going from two people to ten was the hardest stretch.

Notable Quotes

"The broker is the segment in the overall value chain that tends to be, from a technology point of view, underserved the most."

"Copy-pasting from proposals - it's such a mind-numbing task. And it can be automated. If you suddenly free up their hands, they can actually spend time building the relationship with the client."

"If I want to build a product and I have a choice of hiring ten developers or two developers and a great AI tool - I'm definitely going to choose the second one."

"Going to a one-size-fits-all global platform, you end up with something quite mediocre that works around the world but doesn't excel anywhere."

"Work on the business, not in it. I would ask myself to let things go much quicker than I did."

Resources

Guest:

TeamBase: https://www.teambase.io

Robert Koval on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/robertkoval/

Host & Organization:

Joshua R. Hollander on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshuarhollander/

Horton International (USA): https://www.horton-usa.com/

Insurtech Leadership Podcast: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/insurtech-leadership-show

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