InsTech - insurance & innovation
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.
00:07:13 · Jamie Wilson, Matthew Grant
[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. [00:07:44] S0: Yeah. Or, of course, you got attention of not doing what you don't want to do. So I guess sometimes you just gotta say no or or maybe not yet to the client that's trying to drive you too fast. And then this Underwriting Survey, you have 350 people respond to it. I've run surveys before. I know how impressive that is. So before we talk about the survey, how did you actually even manage to get that many people to contribute to giving you feedback?
00:07:44 · Matthew Grant, Jamie Wilson
[00:07:44] S0: Yeah. Or, of course, you got attention of not doing what you don't want to do. So I guess sometimes you just gotta say no or or maybe not yet to the client that's trying to drive you too fast. And then this Underwriting Survey, you have 350 people respond to it. I've run surveys before. I know how impressive that is. So before we talk about the survey, how did you actually even manage to get that many people to contribute to giving you feedback? [00:08:05] S1: Yeah. So we partnered with a company called Coleman Parks. We've worked with them before on these types of surveys, and they've been absolutely fantastic at kind of driving that engagement with the surveys. And so what we managed to get to exactly as you're saying, 350 underwriters responding across The US and The UK, all senior underwriters, so lead underwriters or, like, heads of or CEOs, all working in commercial and specialty. So trying to tailor it to the audience that's most relevant to effectively the underwriters and companies that we work with day in, day out of the company. [00:08:38] S0: Before we go on with that, you're gonna make this report available to the listeners of the InsTech podcast, I think, as as well as other people. And that's available on the website, I believe, and they can contact you directly to learn more about
00:08:38 · Matthew Grant, Jamie Wilson
[00:08:38] S0: Before we go on with that, you're gonna make this report available to the listeners of the InsTech podcast, I think, as as well as other people. And that's available on the website, I believe, and they can contact you directly to learn more about [00:08:48] S1: it. Exactly that. So if anyone wants access to that, we're gonna be releasing it in September of this year. So it'll be available through the website. You'll probably see some bits and pieces on LinkedIn about it. If you can't, for whatever reason, find it as you're saying, please feel free to contact me on LinkedIn. I will happily point you in the right direction so you can get access. [00:09:05] S0: You gave me a preview of the report, and it is fascinating. And, no surprise, heavily orientated around AI. One of the themes that came out of this, which perhaps you could just explain it a little bit, I can sort of understand it, but was AI is pointed at the floor, not at the ceiling. I'm guessing that's all about fundamentals, but could you just explain a little bit more about what feedback you're getting related to AI?