Introduction
Carriers have spent decades building underwriting models on structured data - loss history, credit scores, telematics - while ignoring one of the richest signals available: how people actually behave when they fill out an application. ForMotiv was built on the premise that digital body language is predictive, and after nearly a decade of proving it, the company just hit profitability.
Woody Klemmer is the co-founder and Head of Growth at ForMotiv, a behavioral analytics platform now embedded across the majority of the top ten U.S. carriers. In this conversation, Josh Hollander and Klemmer dig into the growth paradox carriers can't escape, what agentic AI fraud actually looks like at the application layer, and why the build-versus-buy math on behavioral data almost always favors buying.
Guest Bio
Woody Klemmer is the Co-Founder and Head of Growth at ForMotiv, a behavioral analytics platform purpose-built for the insurance industry. ForMotiv captures digital body language - hesitations, edit patterns, corrections, and interaction behaviors - from online applications and turns them into real-time signals for conversion, risk, and fraud decisions. Klemmer has spent nearly a decade growing the business from a direct-to-consumer tool to an enterprise-wide behavioral intelligence layer serving the majority of the top ten U.S. carriers.
Key Topics
The growth paradox — Every tactic carriers use to grow inadvertently lowers the barrier for misrepresentation and fraud. The impact catches up 12 to 24 months later in loss ratios. ForMotiv's thesis is that behavioral intelligence can break this either/or dynamic between growth and risk.
Intent is two-dimensional - Conversion likelihood on one axis, risk profile on the other. A high-intent applicant who backed into their garage is a fundamentally different underwriting risk than one who just bought a new car.
The Year of the Agent - ForMotiv sold more agent-related solutions than direct solutions for the first time in 2024. Agents know underwriting thresholds and how to game the system. Agent scorecarding and benchmarking tools are now being used for fraud detection, SIU referrals, and new hire training.
Enterprise intent - In 2026, ForMotiv embeds across the full policy lifecycle from first quote to claims, providing a unified behavioral thread across systems that have traditionally been siloed.
Agentic AI detection is live - ForMotiv can identify when an AI agent is completing an application. Carriers are still deciding what to do with that signal, but the detection capability exists today.
First-party data as a model input - Carriers incorporating ForMotiv's behavioral dataset into existing predictive models are seeing measurable jumps in predictive lift from a genuinely novel data source.
Notable Quotes
"Carriers are faced with what we call a growth paradox - the mechanisms they use to grow inadvertently increase risk. And that usually catches up 12, 18, 24 months later."
"We had a carrier say the quiet part out loud: our worry is we're getting the bad business that you're helping protect the other carriers from."
"When people ask who our biggest competitors are, I always say bandwidth and budget. We're sunscreen - protective, but not a necessity until we're integrated."
"The JavaScript component isn't the value. What we've done over a decade is feed it all back to you in 40 milliseconds."
Resources
Guest:
ForMotiv: https://www.formotiv.com
Woody Klemmer: https://www.linkedin.com/in/woodyklemmer/
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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