Making Risk Flow | The Future of Insurance
00:22:44 · Jamie Wilson
Massive manual effort to push out a bunch of Excel reports to suddenly kind of this thing being live all the time. And I think that's what we're starting to see more and more of, is kind of actuaries and kind of... And to be honest, where actuaries don't do this, kind of non actuaries, basically realizing something has to change and doing it instead. But I think kind of effectively actuaries realizing there is a much better way, like kind of more advanced technology exists. There's more advanced reporting. There's more advanced kind of data kind of tooling and coding at the heart of a lot of that as well. Like kind of actually getting upskilled in coding in order to kind of like push out these more advanced solutions.
00:23:22 · Simon Cooper-Williams, Juan de Castro
[00:23:22] S1: In terms of like engagement with that system as well from that front end underwriting, there must have been such a big amount of improvement. I mean, like a similar example with us on like how we would develop. You'd spend a lot of time developing a spreadsheet with an underwriter, and they have to give a lot of their time for that. So it's on top of their day job is iterating with you, developing it. And like, we've observed people have been filling out these spreadsheet raters for years. They put a lot of value in, but then the effort they put in is equal to the value that they get out, and that's where you lose them. So they do this and then dashboards. They don't get data. They don't get analysis that uses the data they put in because it's not accessible. And that's just one of the biggest sort of limitations around that legacy spreadsheet system of a pricing system, which a lot doesn't work. [00:24:13] S0: I mean, there so many issues with that, right? I mean, I've seen the first thing is how do you make in the previous role, right? How do you make sure everybody's using the latest version of the spreadsheet? Even something as that, right? Because if you're distributing the spreadsheets via email, that's probably not...
00:24:13 · Juan de Castro, Jamie Wilson
[00:24:13] S0: I mean, there so many issues with that, right? I mean, I've seen the first thing is how do you make in the previous role, right? How do you make sure everybody's using the latest version of the spreadsheet? Even something as that, right? Because if you're distributing the spreadsheets via email, that's probably not... [00:24:31] S2: Yeah. No, like, how do you make sure that you've got everyone on your email distribution list? How do you kind of, if someone corrects the spreadsheet, like you say, how do you make sure everyone's got the most recent version of the truth? And it just becomes this nightmare of trying to manage a tangle of other things, as opposed to having like a true production system or solution in place where everyone knows where they're working from. [00:24:54] S0: Exactly. And then the other challenge we've seen is then, as you said, Simon, you've got all these underwriters filling all these spreadsheets, the inputs to those spreadsheets get lost. That's not data that's stored anywhere. It's stored in a file system, but it's not discoverable, right?
00:24:54 · Juan de Castro, Simon Cooper-Williams
[00:24:54] S0: Exactly. And then the other challenge we've seen is then, as you said, Simon, you've got all these underwriters filling all these spreadsheets, the inputs to those spreadsheets get lost. That's not data that's stored anywhere. It's stored in a file system, but it's not discoverable, right? [00:25:12] S1: Yeah, completely. Yeah, I'm very happy to go hard on spreadsheets. Are completely trying to move off them, so happy to dis them as we go. But yeah, mean, I think another theme with them is that the user interface and just that UI functionality of spreadsheets, we just lost people on that. I think you'd see whoever happened to develop it would have a different style. And if someone wanted to pick it up, they would completely make it their own again. It just, from a usability perspective, it just didn't feel like it was part of the company's infrastructure. It wasn't part of that underwriting workflow at all. You just completely lose people given that. They're also incredibly hard to pick apart as well. Mean, we've all been there where someone joins, someone's developed a previous model, you have to start and try and understand that. And if you want to add something as simple as adding a rating factor or even integrating external data. That's what a lot of people talk about, putting an API functionality in there and automating that data to come in. I mean, these things were just incredibly painful and pretty much impossible doing it in those sort of systems.
00:26:21 · Juan de Castro
[00:26:21] S0: Okay. So perhaps this is a good point to ask you, Jamie. Most of the questions so far have been about your history as an actuary in different insurers. A lot of what you're doing now within Hyperexponential obviously is helping insurers move away from spreadsheets and having a much more nimble way of pricing. So let's start with what does it look like? So like what does it mean? We've already complained a lot about the history of spreadsheets. What does it look like with a more modern rating engine?
00:26:51 · Jamie Wilson
[00:26:51] S2: Yeah, no, it's a great question. So I guess kind of the very, very short answer to the point Simon was making earlier, right? We spent years asking underwriters to enter data into these spreadsheets and then not giving them much in return. Kind of suddenly there is so much opportunity with a system like HX Renew to start getting return to the underwriter straight away. It's no longer this point of, okay, I've got this standalone spreadsheet and underwriter is gonna go and copy and paste a lot of data into it. Get a number out that they don't even trust. And then kind of go about their normal day to day underwriting. Like kind of what rating tools can look like, what pricing tools can look like is effectively a really embedded part of the underwriter workflow. So it's integrated with your other internal systems. So it's pushing and pulling data from your policy admin system. It's connected to your sanction screening. So all of this stuff, rather than me having to kind of copy and paste data into multiple systems, I put it into one place, click a button and my pricing tool is automatically populated or my policy admin systems automatically populated. I think that's one of the key things. I think kind of, there's a real opportunity there as well, Juan. The kind of the risk of us, me kind of talking about Cytora and HX for new integrations and going on about that for too long. There's the opportunity to properly integrate with platforms like Cytora. So that kind of data can be flowing in from the submission straight into the pricing tool, straight through to the policy admin system without the underwriter entering a single data field or kind of external data enrichment. Kind of suddenly an underwriting click a button and like we can scrape data from websites, pull in data from APIs, like query data from databases. So that kind of actually you start thinking about all of that processes automated. And then on top of that, you can start trying to work out what's the additional insights I can put in front of the underwriter at the point of pricing. So kind of rather than it being like the pricing tool is there to produce just a technical price. Instead it can, obviously it's still gonna produce a technical price, but what is the other insight I want my underwriter to see the at point of pricing?