At this year’s Global Insurtech Summit in London on 18th April, Fintech Global interviews Robert to draw on his extensive experience and deep expertise in insurtech.

Robert answers the following questions:

• What are some of the biggest trends you are seeing in insurance?

• How can improved data tools help insurance companies transform their operations?

• Why is effectively leveraging data so critical in a highly competitive environment?

• How should insurers be leveraging automation within their workflows?

• How is Ascent helping insurers with their digitalisation efforts?

Our customer is a leading global provider of reinsurance, primary insurance and insurance-related risk solutions, with a reputation for innovation.

The brief.

Like most reinsurers, our customer had a decentralised legacy landscape with heavy functional overlap across a diverse range of technologies. Different applications — each covering the net/gross pricing workflow — had been created for specialised Treaty and Facultative areas. This created inefficiencies as underwriters moved between multiple tools and interfaces to complete pricing processes.

We were initially engaged to help create a unified, streamlined underwriting platform geared for scale, consolidating legacy applications into a single integrated workflow. Over time, these original requirements evolved into an innovation-led roadmap that would enable our customer to build competitive edge with second and third generation pricing capabilities. This included developing the ability to flexibly combine and link mathematical models across business segments, and later the ability to fully automate the underwriting process, using meta data to build new models that cover new risks and enable the processing of dark data.

The solution.

A multi-year project. Multiple teams. Multiple countries. We worked closely with actuaries and underwriters on a daily basis and built the deep domain knowledge to deliver success for our customer.

Underwriting platform

We consolidated net pricing kernels (developed by the actuaries under a common loss component interface) and introduced a Common Gross Pricing calculation that incorporated loadings and contract conditions.

To build commonality and to harmonise the legacy landscape, we designed a common reporting interface at a database level across all Treaty and Facultative business domains to normalise operations, and a common submission and coverage module to define semantics in proportional and non-proportional business.

This enabled us to standardise both the way offers are created and signed, and the management of long-tail triangle structures, bringing the workflow into a single tool through automation.

Exposure

We then built a system that would manage detailed location-based exposure data from various sources and formats ranging from EDM to Excel input.

The exposure system is cloud-native, built on Azure for scale, and accommodates varying modelling workloads and large exposure data volumes. Exposure data is transformed and normalised into a format where it can be analysed and used for natural catastrophe model runs, additionally interfacing with the underwriting platform where it is used to shape pricing.

Automated underwriting platform

To further competitive edge through digital innovation, we created a channel proposition for the insurance sector that transforms time-to-market for new products and services via a fully automated underwriting process.

The outcome.

The integrated underwriting system now allows thousands of underwriters across the globe to efficiently calculate reinsurance coverages, using significantly fewer tools. The new reporting interface has also given Corporate Underwriting a consolidated view of performance across all Treaty and Facultative insurance products.

The exposure system enables our customer to minimise the operational burden in risk analysis and modelling, and to improve modelling productivity overall — accessing, calibrating, comparing and deploying risk models in one place.

The automated underwriting platform has helped our customer maintain their position at the frontier of insurance innovation, helping its channel partners launch, distribute and scale new or existing insurance products significantly faster, reducing costs and increasing process efficiency.