InsTech - insurance & innovation
00:00:08 · Matthew Grant, Jamie Wilson
[00:00:08] S0: Jamie, great to speak to you. You are vice president of strategy for Hyperexponential, Hyperexponential, a company that we've enjoyed getting to know over the last few years and follow your success. We're gonna use the abbreviation HX today, just making it simpler. Founded back in 2017, raised $73,000,000 in January 2024. You initially started off as a pricing platform, but we're gonna be talking about how that's developed now across the whole of underwriting and also actually getting some input from a survey you did with an extraordinary number of underwriters contributing to that. You've expanded into The US. You're gonna hear a bit about that. And, Jamie, prior to joining HX three years ago, you were an insurance actuary at Allianz and WTW. Welcome. [00:00:48] S1: Awesome. Thanks for having me here, Matthew. Looking forward to the conversation. [00:00:52] S0: It's a question everybody is always interested in. People who've got stable careers in conventional insurance companies leave to go I guess you were joining a scale up when you joined HX. What was it that took you from the stable life of being an actuary into something a little bit more risky with a scale up?
00:01:08 · Jamie Wilson
[00:01:08] S1: I have to admit, I wasn't looking for a job at the time. I was very, very comfortable working at Allianz. I've been there for a number of years. I had lots of very interesting and exciting roles. But a couple of years before I left Allianz, I got the opportunity to actually play around with the HX platform. In my role, I was helping to lead a technology transformation project. We were looking at lots of different applications at that point. And so I got access to the HX platform well before I joined the company. I had a half day of training. I then spent that very first evening after the day of training playing around the entire evening with the platform. And much to my wife's frustration, I then spent every evening of that week playing with the HX platform, seeing what I tried to build out new pricing tools, seeing how I could push the boundaries of what it could do. And every day, I'd come back into the office, and I would jump on a call with the HX team and basically ask them all of these really gnarly technical questions. And they had exceptional answers for every single difficult question I had. And I loved it. It was one of my favorite weeks of work. And I was genuinely excited about how we could leverage technology like that to deploy improvements to kind of the front line of underwriting much, much faster, especially on the pricing side of things. So kind of two years after that event of playing around with the HX platform, I got tapped on the shoulder from someone I knew at the company at HX. He basically invited me to apply for a role as head of pricing and innovation at HX. And as you were saying, I had never, at any point in my career, thought of moving into tech. But actually, I kind of weighed it up, and I said, well, this is an opportunity to keep playing with a product, like some technology that I'm particularly excited about. And also an opportunity to work with the wider market as well on their transformations, like getting the opportunity to kind of not just see how is this working within the company I'm working in today, but how is the whole market facing pricing and underwriting transformation. So that, for me, was the big driver is both products and also the opportunity to kind of see how the wider market was working on these problems.
00:03:04 · Matthew Grant
[00:03:04] S0: A great story. It's always interesting talking to people who founded companies because they had a problem and couldn't solve it and went off and built a product, which I think is actually Amrit's story about why he founded Hyperexponential. But, I mean, you're on the other side of that equation, really. You find a product, someone has built it, that's kind of solving your problems, and then you go and join the company. And a reminder for all of us, actually, how serendipity plays such an important part in life. You come across that, and then someone offers you a job and working at a tech company, which is going really well. And and, of course, the shift in role as well. So what does it mean to move from being an actuary into VP of strategy? What's your day job look like?
00:03:37 · Jamie Wilson, Matthew Grant
[00:03:37] S1: Yeah. The day job's an interesting one. VP of strategy, I get the joy of working on lots of different areas of the company. But, like, at the core of my role, I'm involved very heavily in longer term product strategy. So where do we place our bets? What are the things we build as a tech company that will drive the greatest value for our customers? And crucially, what are the things we choose not to build as well? Both of those things are equally as important. So very involved on that side of things. And then also very involved in the go to market of new products or the go to market in new regions as well. And so kind of wherever we're starting to release new products and new capabilities, I get very involved in conversations with customers and making sure that kind of that process runs smoothly. Then when we look to enter kind of new regions or markets, I also get heavily involved in that side of things as well, just leveraging my experience working across different regions and markets historically. [00:04:28] S0: Yeah, I'm glad you mentioned the strategy is about what you don't do because so often companies fail because they try to do too much and they're disciplined to zero in on what's really important. But on that topic, and I'd hinted this earlier on with the description of how you move from the pricing platform, what problem are you solving for people today as you look beyond offering a pricing platform?
00:04:46 · Jamie Wilson
[00:04:46] S1: As you referred to earlier, HX started with Amrit looking to solve a particular problem. Amrit and MJ, the two cofounders, and they were looking to solve problems around the pricing part of the underwriter journey. And part of the reason for that was, you know, that's a very high leverage decision point in any underwriter workflow. But in particular, in the commercial specialty world, at least at that point in time, like in the history of HX, it was a part of the workflow where there was a lot of pain points associated with it. I knew that from my own time working in industry. I knew that from kind of industry peers, people that I'd worked with. And so HX effectively looked to try and solve for that pricing problem of can we help our customers deploy pricing models, deploy pricing tools to underwriters at speed, and can they iterate on these pricing tools, drive greater insight to underwriters, again, trying to, like, do that quickly and at speed. And so we saw really great success in that space. But one of the interesting things that started to happen, I'd say more like three, four years ago, we started to see customers pulling us left and right of that pricing part of the underwriter workflow. So, like, pricing is really at the heart of kind of the center of kind of the underwriter workflow. We started to see customers basically saying, can we... That calculation engine, HX, that we currently use for pricing, can we use that for other parts of the workflow? They said, we deploy a risk appetite model here or kind of a predictive model there that's not really pricing? And then we'd have other customers start saying, can we use the workflow components or the flexibility of the platform to start pulling you into kind of other areas like peer review, referrals, authorities? And so we had customers doing that, and they were pushing the platform beyond what it was originally intended to be. So about three years ago, we then started responding to that and build out new product capabilities, features to effectively allow our customers to actually build out a full end to end workbench within the HX platform. So that's where we've got to today. I would have described the platform a few months ago would have been as, like, effectively an AI assisted workbench. I can take a submission in.
00:06:44 · Jamie Wilson, Matthew Grant
I can use AI in various points to help the underwriter as their journey, and I can go all way from the submission going in to a quote going out all within the HX platform. [00:06:53] S0: There's a very interesting Harvard Business Review article, to your point about looking left, looking right, sometimes referred to as upstream, downstream, that's where to look to grow the business. Actually, there's also another quote that I'm sure you're familiar with, which is when you get in the top two or three of the the market you're in, you basically go and expand your market, and and then you obviously go into a bigger market, which sounds like you've done both [00:07:13] S1: of those things. That point around looking left, right, or looking upstream, downstream, that drives a lot of our product strategy. It's like, okay. If a customer is pulling us in that direction already, that's the best place to move. It may be that you as a a tech company are like, oh, this would be great if we could go and do x and y and zed. Ideally, if you've got customers trying to do it in your platform already, but the platform's not built for it, that is the ideal, like, indicator of this is a great space to start moving into. And that's exactly what we did about three years ago as we started to branch out across the end to end underwriting workflow.