Scouting for Growth
00:25:49 · Richard Gunn, Sabine VanderLinden
[00:25:49] S1: Absolutely. [00:25:51] S0: So now you're working, I assume mostly in Europe and United Kingdom. And now Richard, you are in The United States. You are scaling in New York right now, but I assume across The US, working with insurers, I assume, on the East Coast, West Coast. You know, I know quite a few in Texas, as well as on, you know, in Hartford, and I'm sure they would be loving meeting you. But so, what does that mean, Scaling Hx Renew across continent? Will you work with the existing client base? Are you going to, I'm sure, look for new clients? But what scaling means for Hyperexponential?
00:26:33 · Richard Gunn
[00:26:33] S1: Yeah. I will... I'll probably give you a different answer to this in twelve months' time once I've made all the mistakes that we're about to to make. So some... Someone gave me some advice that you will, like, iterate your operating model five times before you get it right in The US, so just be prepared to be wrong at least four times. So take that as a caveat to my answer. One thing that's kind of worth highlighting is, like, there's currently about $45,000,000,000 of GWP that's priced in our platform each year. About 30% of that is already US premiums, and it broadly resolves to about 30% of our clients being US based already. So we're fortunate enough to work with a number of large US insurers. They kind of... When you read the kind of startup kind of, like, guidebooks around expanding either side of the pond, generally, it says, like, the hardest two things are, like, one, getting the culture right, and then two is winning your first customer. So we're kind of fortunate to have a handful of clients already out here who we can, like, build success with and then share that success as a way of building confidence in the market. There's also a lot of kind of... There's lots of similarities between, like, the Lloyd and London market and the E and S space, excess and surplus space in The US. So like our platform is like kind of very well suited to kind of writing US risks as well as it is London risks. So that's kind of like we have that benefit on day one. We're also working with a number of our UK clients who've got strategies to expand into The US, and there's kind of like a natural opportunity for us to partner there. But as you highlight, I'm out here at the moment. I'm building a team. There's four or five of us in in our office in the Rockefellas today, which is exciting, and and we will be growing out a team here. And, like, that's super important. Like, we've been proud from day one that we're by the market for the market. Right? Our founders from the market, like, were technologists by training, and then they spent thirty five years collectively in the insurance industry. And that's been, like, key to our success, really, is that like deep connectivity and understanding of the market's problems.
00:28:32 · Richard Gunn, Sabine VanderLinden
And that's why we're putting an emphasis on hiring experienced US insurance leaders so that they can help form our kind of product strategy as we evolve it to be able to unlock other parts of The US market beyond ENS. Like we're working with some clients in the admitted space now. I mentioned we're moving more towards the SME space as well and just kind of make sure that we are following the cues from the market rather than building what we think the market would like and then hope that they come. [00:28:59] S0: Yeah. I mean, you know, I'm going to use these terms that some people like, some dislike is test and learn, right? You are going to be in the market. You are going to refine your business model. You are going to serve your existing customer, find new ones who actually appreciate good pricing mechanism, and I'm sure there are many in The US market. And so I assume that also means that we will see you at ITC Vegas this year. [00:29:22] S1: You will indeed, with all of our bells and whistles. So we're very excited to go to that. It'll be the first time that we're going to ITC Vegas. And yeah, we'll be there. I think we'll be speaking in a couple of slots and there to meet people and discuss and understand, you know, about what's working for them, what's not working for them and see how we can partner.
00:29:22 · Richard Gunn, Sabine VanderLinden
[00:29:22] S1: You will indeed, with all of our bells and whistles. So we're very excited to go to that. It'll be the first time that we're going to ITC Vegas. And yeah, we'll be there. I think we'll be speaking in a couple of slots and there to meet people and discuss and understand, you know, about what's working for them, what's not working for them and see how we can partner. [00:29:43] S0: Yeah. I think it's very important to understand that your style is first to really understand the problem. You want to be able to meet as many US located insurers, chief underwriting officers, actuaries, pricing experts, to really understand what is the challenge they are facing in the local market. As you know, when we think about emerging risk, a number of insurers have come out of specific risk, as you know, because of climate change and emerging risk that they are unable to really understand. And so being able to have a conversation with you around, you know, how do we use all these data? Maybe external data sources we don't know about and actually start building pricing, which are right pricing for the risk we are actually prepared to undertake is going to be critical. And I assume you're happy to engage in those conversations.
00:30:28 · Richard Gunn, Sabine VanderLinden
[00:30:28] S1: Very, very happy to. I'd add to that list as well. We're increasingly having conversations with team members on the IT side of the business, with our CIO, CDO, CTO, and everything, everyone below. And that's, you know, motivated by the macro trend around Gen AI and everyone being asked the question or asking themselves the question like, how are you leveraging Gen AI? And then kind of the question that kind of that peels peels away is like, do you have the data to be able to leverage it? And and that's where we will often come in and have a conversation. Like, as I mentioned earlier on the on this recording, like, a a key part of our platform is capturing and structuring that data. So it kind of positions our clients very positively to be... Then be able to leverage this emerging capability, and we're we're increasingly having conversations on the IT side of business to understand how we might better help them there. [00:31:20] S0: Is it fair that you are actually exploring or leveraging Jira TVI, right?
00:31:24 · Richard Gunn
[00:31:24] S1: Yeah, a lot inside of our business, and we announced at HxLive, so I think I can share on this as well, like, what our strategy is and what we're putting in the hands of our clients. One thing, we didn't rush to put an AI badge on our brand. We rush to use it internally. Like, the framework that that... Or kind of like the the way that someone framed it to me was like, need to... You you and your organization need to have... Work out how to leverage AI better and faster than your customers and your competitors. Otherwise, you will lose. Right? And I think that's like a really powerful pertinent statement that everyone should internalize. And so we rush to kind of to leverage and understand where it can add the most value both to us in our day to day. So a lot of my go to market team will leverage AI on a daily basis, often without realizing it and often intentionally with some of the kind of internal kind of co pilots, if you will, that we've built out. But from a client perspective as well, like thinking about how our consulting team could leverage AI within Hx Renew, and then we can share some of those learnings. So the first question that we asked ourselves was, like, why are we uniquely positioned to be able to enable AI in our platform rather than, like, how can we enable AI in our platform? It's like, why are we uniquely positioned? And, like, broadly for us, what that resolves to is, like, we... Our actuaries will log into an IDE on our platform, a development environment. And so you have, like, full the development and deployment environment at all of your models and all your data and the interface all in one place. And then we aggregate that data asset that sits underneath it. So all of the activities that the actuaries and the underwriters do on our platform, we then aggregate that into a data asset. And then we seamlessly integrate that into your wider tech stack. So that gives you, like, the foundations to really build and, like, make the most of kind of the emerging capabilities in Gen AI. Right? And so in terms of, like, what that's manifested in terms of our strategy, it's like kind of really, like, threefold. So, like, first of all is actually to build out some libraries, like AI libraries in our platform. We have the idea of libraries in our platform.