Today we announced the news that we have acquired Infutor and will integrate the company with Jornaya to create expanded value for all of our customers and partners in the months and years to come. Our combined organizations will operate as Verisk Marketing Solutions, creating a talented team of data and technology experts who will build and deliver data-driven solutions to serve CMO’s and their teams in Insurance, Financial Services, AdTech/MarTech, and a variety of other industries. This is just the beginning of our next chapter as a Verisk business, and we’re very excited to share more about what this will mean for all of our customers and partners!

In the note below, I’ll start by providing more context on our evolution and where we are headed next as we join forces with Infutor. Read the press release.

Jornaya’s Evolution

In December of 2020, Jornaya was acquired by Verisk Analytics. The acquisition of Jornaya signaled the beginning of what we think of as “Chapter Three” of our company’s evolution. “Chapter One” began when Ross Shanken founded LeadiD in 2011, setting off on a mission to create a new level of trust and transparency between lead buyers and lead sellers with a neutral, universal standard for understanding the origin and history of a lead. By 2016, it became clear that there was an even bigger opportunity – our technology was deployed across over 35,000 websites and we were working with dozens of the largest enterprise brands in insurance and financial services, who were asking us to innovate and solve broader challenges for them in their marketing programs.

Customer feedback and the desire for new and innovative data led us into what we think of as “Chapter Two,” as we re-branded the company to Jornaya and built new products that could help our Publisher and Enterprise Brand customers improve the way in which they interact with consumers who are making major life purchase decisions. We experienced significant growth as we innovated, culminating in the acquisition of Jornaya by Verisk in December of 2020. Our partners at Verisk had gotten to know us over the years, and they had a high level of respect for the business that we had built, including the company culture and the domain expertise of our employees. Together, we saw an opportunity for Verisk to become the strategic home that could help evolve Jornaya into our “Chapter Three,” leveraging access to expanded resources, deeper relationships in the insurance sector, and the support, expertise, and investment to execute inorganic growth paths.

Jornaya is now one year into “Chapter Three” as a Verisk business, and we are prepared to significantly increase the scale and scope of our solutions to more holistically address the goal that our customers are working towards:

Marketers who want to create exceptional experiences for their customers and prospects need to send the right message, to the right person, at the right time, while operating with the highest level of data security and respect for the consumer’s privacy, preferences, and permissions.

Jornaya has historically created solutions that help address critical slices of this goal. For example:

• PERMISSION – TCPA Guardian: Our customers access real-time insight into consumer consent and permission to be contacted through our TCPA Guardian product. This ensures that before a marketer attempts to contact a consumer, they are able to verify that the consumer gave consent for them to do so. Honoring the consumer’s consent is critical for marketers who intend to create positive experiences for their customers and prospects.
   
• WHEN – Activate: Leveraging our unique view into in-market shopping behavior for highly considered purchase journeys, our Activate customers can discover WHEN to engage with their customers and prospects. This solves for “right timed” communications, enabling the ability to engage with a consumer when they are truly in-market and interested.

Where We Are Headed Next as Verisk Marketing Solutions

These solutions have solved critical slices of the “right person, right message, right time” goal. But there is more work to be done in completing the picture and delivering on a holistic and complete solution for our customers. Fully solving our customers’ goal involves a broader set of data and solutions across the following strategic themes:

WHO: “Right Person” Identity Resolution is the foundational data layer for personalized marketing – and it is becoming more and more challenging for marketers as the privacy landscape evolves and third party cookies are deprecated. Understanding WHO the person is behind any interaction is a critical first step to creating effective engagement. Most marketers struggle with disparate and incomplete data across their website, CRM, call-center, and outbound marketing channels. With effective Identity Resolution, these disparate consumer records and interactions can be linked and matched to a persistent ID, creating a unified view of identity across the enterprise.

WHAT: “Right Message” Determining WHAT message will be most relevant to an individual consumer is a function of understanding the attributes of that person and their household. The messaging and the offer delivered can be tailored to the individual with an understanding of critical factors like demographics, property ownership, financial profile, spending patterns, and a range of other characteristics that can create context for relevant messaging and understanding of the people you are trying to reach.

WHEN: “Right Time” Determining WHEN to engage with the consumer is critical in order to create positive consumer experiences. With insight into in-market shopping behavior, marketers can automate right-timed communications with customers and prospects who are truly interested and in need of their products – and they can avoid unnecessary and unappreciated communication with consumer’s who are not in-market.

DATA SECURITY & PRIVACY: Marketers and enterprises who truly want to create exceptional experiences for their consumers understand that they need to not only secure their data, but they also need to put privacy and permission at the forefront of their customer and prospect relationships. This means implementing high levels of data security, including careful management and selection of vendors, protection of PII, and secure data sharing systems. It also means tracking and managing permission and preference across consumer interactions.

Joining Forces with Infutor

The acquisition of Infutor represents an amazing opportunity to accelerate towards expanded value for our customers across all the aforementioned strategic themes.

Complementary Data Products: Infutor specializes in identity resolution (WHO) and consumer intelligence, delivering a comprehensive set of person and household attributes (WHAT) for marketers. They have a technology platform that can make data available in milliseconds, allowing for real-time decisioning across any consumer interaction. Combining these capabilities with Jornaya’s unique in-market behaviors (WHEN) will create a multiple of value for our customers.

Complementary Verticals: Infutor has deep experience delivering solutions to other data companies, analytics teams, AdTech/MarTech companies, real-estate firms, and a variety of other industries that have turned to them as a critical partner in solving identity resolution. Jornaya and Verisk have deep relationships in Insurance, Financial Services, and Performance Marketing/Lead-Generation. Together, we will be able to create highly specialized, vertical specific solutions that add greater value for our customers.

Complementary Talent & Cultures: Most importantly, we are extremely excited about the expansion of our team and the opportunity to learn from Infutor’s employees. Gary and the leadership team at Infutor have built an extraordinary culture of talented employees who will join us and add deep domain expertise that will help us define and build towards this future. We have had the pleasure of getting to know many members of the Infutor team over the past few years, and I have been thoroughly impressed with the way in which this team operates with high integrity and a commitment to customer value and service.

We look forward to sharing more in the coming months as we progress in our plans. We're especially excited to reveal more details this May at V!A Philadelphia 2022. In the meantime, please reference our FAQ guide for more detail, and feel free to reach out to us directly if you have further questions.