Our Philosophy
Onebrightly provides high-touch personal and commercial digital solutions services for the benefit of carriers, brokers, agents, affinity groups, other financial institutions and over thirty-five other specialized industry verticals. The company was founded to disrupt the way insurance, services and technology are provided to policyholders — to fix a system that is broken. We stand up personal and commercial line solutions quickly and provide services otherwise not available in the market. We bundle these lines with other technology and data-driven service solutions from other onebrightly-partner companies to enable players in the insurance industry to better understand their policyholders and drive new sources of engagement and revenue otherwise unattainable.
Our Pledge
We listen carefully to our clients, their policyholders and the marketplace. Listening enables us to bridge the client capabilities of yesterday with the innovative digital solutions of their tomorrow. Frankly, listening is the only way we know to identify and assess needs and realize new vision and innovation. At our core, helping you, our client, to solve challenging and at times, perplexing problems, is our mission. Carriers, brokers, agencies and many other groups have relied on our leadership's timeliness and innovation to service their policyholders, depositors, and members for decades. Your needs and those of your clients are the focal point of everything we do. We seek to provide services and solutions that will directly serve your clients' needs and your strategic goals.
Our Skills
The Onebrightly leadership team brings depth and breadth of industry experience including building customer-centric technology platforms in the Financial Services and Insurance industries. onebrightly partners have previously held leadership positions at brokerage and agency firms specializing in Association, Direct Marketing, Life and Health, and Property-Casualty. We have led and participated in product development and innovation for insurance, and complementary and standalone risk management and protection products and services. This has all been honed through years of sales and marketing, technology, and analytics experience.
We are passionate about the services we build — not only for the technological and business opportunities they present but also for the potential they have to effect positive change in the lives of ordinary Americans. We have cultivated a team that pioneers new solutions and demonstrates an unwavering commitment to transformational and positive change.
Our Principals
Philip Gow, Managing Partner
Philip Gow is a co-founder and the current Managing Partner at Onebrightly. Drawing from his diverse background in business and technology, Mr. Gow has led the formation of Onebrightly's unique approach to the insurance industry — combining intelligent technology with high-touch services to deliver real value to carriers and brokers, allowing them to stand up lines quickly and to better serve the needs of the end-user while keeping costs low.
A leader in business and technology, Mr. Gow has established and led Onebrightly's partner groups, Advisory Platform Solutions (APS) and Global Institutional Solutions (GIS). APS functions as a consulting firm specializing in solutions that address the unique challenges of the investment community, while GIS provides health, privacy, and disaster, chargeback, and employer policies services to Institutional clients. Recognizing the market need for insurance carriers and brokers to operationalize new lines of business quickly, Mr. Gow incorporated aspects of APS and GIS to form Onebrightly in 2017.
Prior to founding APS, GIS, and Onebrightly, Mr. Gow led the Wealth Management and Financial Planning practice at American Management Systems (currently CGI). His entrepreneurial experience includes successfully establishing and leading three technology services firms, an online education company, and a digital financial planning tools company. His professional experience includes providing strategic consulting services to CEOs within Underwriter 500 banking, brokerage and insurance firms.
An acknowledged expert in management and technology consulting, Mr. Gow routinely addresses industry conferences and contributes regularly to industry events and publications. In addition to his focus on digital marketing and wealth management, he provides contributions to the areas of client experience, innovation, digital publishing, site usability, and tool adoption.
Mr. Gow holds an undergraduate degree from John Hopkins University and advanced degrees from The Wharton School and Harvard University.
M Elizabeth Byam
M Elizabeth Byam brings her experience as COO for Advisory Platform Solutions to the same role for Onebrightly, .
Ms. Byam has held director and managerial positions in multiple industries, including professional consultancies, financial services, and insurance. Her experience includes work with notable financial services and insurance firms such as Security Pacific National Bank (Bank of America), TRW Credit (Equifax), Morgan Stanley, T Rowe Price, TIAA-CREF, Vanguard, Coastal States Life Insurance, Cologne Reinsurance, Prudential, and Transamerica.
Ms. Byam's earlier career emphasized all phases of product development and project management life cycles. Her specialties include corporate and business strategic evaluations through SWOT analysis, effectiveness reviews, organizational analysis, and process investigation; all phases of risk management at the project, program, business, and enterprise levels; build versus buy decisions; implementation planning and strategic pilot selection; contract negotiation, administration, and maintenance agreements; and contract closeout.
Ms. Byam holds her MBA from the Anderson School at the University of New Mexico and a PMP from the Project Management Institute.
Kevin Ames
Kevin Ames brings more than 20 years of software architecture and development experience to Onebrightly and serves as chief technology officer. Mr. Ames has an extensive technological background covering all aspects of the software development lifecycle across multiple disciplines including transportation, computer hardware & software, and financial industries.
For the past 10 years Mr. Ames has been a lead architect and developer for Advisory Platform Solutions (APS) focused primarily on web-based software development for the financial and insurance communities. During that time he has architected, designed and developed both front-end and back-end systems with focus on quality, reliability, usability and scalability of those solutions.
Prior to joining APS, Mr. Ames served as a software developer for Hewlett-Packard where he helped architect and develop the first software-oriented architecture (SOA) platform within the company. He began his career with Federal Express where he worked on a real-time tracking system for both land and air-based vehicles.
Mr. Ames holds an undergraduate degree from Dartmouth College and advanced degrees from the Thayer School of Engineering and from the University of Tennessee.