InsTech - insurance & innovation
00:20:12 · Matthew Grant
[00:20:12] S0: And then now that you've got this tire solution set, you've expanded the footprint of what you're doing with the company, how are you finding insurance companies are buying these days? Because they might already have their own preferred ingestion tool. Is it an all or nothing solution now, or can people pick and choose and integrate with what you're offering on a modular basis?
00:20:28 · Jamie Wilson
[00:20:28] S1: Yeah, it's a great question. We, at HX, we've always been very architecturally flexible. So even when we were just a pricing solution, we had some customers who wanted to use us in particular ways with their policy admin systems or workbenches, we've always made it possible for our customers to integrate in all sorts of different ways. With all of the end to end workbench capabilities, as we've been building that out, that's exactly the question you've asked has come up time and time again. It's like, okay. Well, I've already got this capability. Can I plug that into HX? And classically, the answer is yes. The interesting thing, however, is there will... If you are looking for agentic workflows and a system or an agent that can only see one step or can only manage one or two steps will be limited in only being able to manage those two... One or two steps, if that makes sense. So there's going to be very interesting conversations, I think, across the industry around integration patterns, around how do you enable agentic workflows, where actually I've currently got point solution one for ingestion, point solution two for triage, point solution three for pricing and rating, point solution four for workflows, and point solution five for managing my document generation. That will... Although kind of it might be buying the best of breed, is valuable to the extent I've got really good solutions for each of those things, it might limit what I'm able to do from a full end to end agentic workflow. Despite that, we remain very architecturally flexible. We're very, very pro integration because there is maybe one or two of our customers come along a year with a pure greenfield site of, like, we've got no existing architecture. We're moving into a new product space. We'd love to build with HX. 95% of our customers come with a, I've already got this policy app in the system, or I've already got this part of a workbench, or I've already got this ingestion tool. And so we then just work with them to make sure that they can get the full value out of the AJAX platform.
00:22:19 · Matthew Grant, Jamie Wilson
[00:22:19] S0: Yeah. That whole integration piece, we talked about it for a while, but clearly it's a big difference for the ability to expand and no longer those long cycles to replace technology. And then, you touched on The US. I spoke to Richard Gunn last year. He's obviously in The US. He had, I think, 20 people at a time. I know that's gone from strength to strength, but I'd be glad to get an update on what's happening with your US clients and footprint. The US side of things has [00:22:42] S1: been going really well over the course of the last couple of years. You'll have heard from Richard a year ago. I think we've got to the point of, I think, about 35,000,000,000 of GWP is bound on the platform each year in The US. So we're seeing a lot of growth. That's coming from two key areas. One is our existing multinational customers. So even when we were in 2017, 2018, 2019, a pricing platform, one or two of our very early customers were actually US domiciled. Moving to The US has allowed us to partner more closely with existing customers. But, obviously, a large part of the reason to move out there is to start partnering with new carriers, new MGAs that we wouldn't have been able to reach from the London market. And so we kind of... We've seen more and more growth in that area, which is really exciting, and also brings about its own challenges as you start to then make sure the product works really, really well for the London market and also really well for The US market as well.
00:22:42 · Jamie Wilson, Matthew Grant
[00:22:42] S1: been going really well over the course of the last couple of years. You'll have heard from Richard a year ago. I think we've got to the point of, I think, about 35,000,000,000 of GWP is bound on the platform each year in The US. So we're seeing a lot of growth. That's coming from two key areas. One is our existing multinational customers. So even when we were in 2017, 2018, 2019, a pricing platform, one or two of our very early customers were actually US domiciled. Moving to The US has allowed us to partner more closely with existing customers. But, obviously, a large part of the reason to move out there is to start partnering with new carriers, new MGAs that we wouldn't have been able to reach from the London market. And so we kind of... We've seen more and more growth in that area, which is really exciting, and also brings about its own challenges as you start to then make sure the product works really, really well for the London market and also really well for The US market as well. [00:23:35] S0: Yeah. It's great for HX, great for the insurance world, it's great for The UK as well, having companies that are starting in The UK, expanding into The US. Congratulations on that. What else should I be asking you about? Anything we haven't covered that you want to talk about?
00:23:48 · Jamie Wilson
[00:23:48] S1: Yeah. There was one additional point that came out of the Underwriting Edge Survey, which is this concept of the succession paradox is how we're, like, terming it within the report. It's this idea we asked the underwriters in the reports, what's the one thing you are most concerned about over the course of the coming years? And so kind of like, flag one thing, what are you most anxious about? The number one future concern was senior judgment leaving the industry before it's had a chance to be passed on to more junior team members. So this idea of, okay, we've got lots of very experienced, very talented underwriters working at senior levels, but how many of them are going to leave the industry through retirement, through exiting kind of the insurance industry before they've had a chance to pass on that domain experience to kind of more junior underwriters? So that was the thing that people were most concerned around. The paradox piece comes in when we asked those same underwriters, what are your current company's top 10 investment priorities? And at the very end of those investment priorities, ranked tenth was coaching of junior team members. So you've got effectively, we are investing, like, heavily in technology, heavily in AI, so on and so forth. But the biggest anxiety on the underwriter side was what is, effectively, kind of loss of expertise, but that's not being met by the investment itself. So I think that for me was, like, a really interesting, like, finding of the report. And also, the kind of... If my hopefully not naive optimism is that actually AI might even play a role to support that. That effectively, if you imagine a system where I, as a junior underwriter, are looking at an individual risk and effectively an AI kind of... Or an agentic kind of support setup is telling me, by the way, did you know that senior underwriters in your company classically look at x y zed when they have looked at risks like these? Or your underwriter guidelines are telling you x y is a b c? Or did you know there's something very weird about this risk that you might have overlooked that kind of maybe AI won't be the only thing that solves for kind of that potential loss of talent, but maybe it has a role to play in helping to coach and support junior underwriters.
00:26:02 · Matthew Grant
[00:26:02] S0: And I think the other thing that helps in this, and maybe it's just a familiarity bias in this space, but I'm sure I'm hearing more and more from the children of friends and acquaintances, because I'm at that stage where they're starting to look for jobs, are actually very interested by insurance. Word has got out that insurance is a good place to go. So even the problem is underwriters who don't want to leave, there is a sort of pressure coming from people. Or at least, I shouldn't say pressure. There's availability of a lot of talent coming into the industry as well, who, of course, are all very much tied into understanding about technology and AI. Good old, Jamie. We covered a lot there. Before I let you go, though, I do need to get your recommendation on a book or a podcast in your spare time. And given that you spent your spare time a few years ago working on your product, you can have a technical offering or you can have one that's got nothing to do with technology or insurance at all, but I'd love to hear your recommendation for a book or a podcast.