InsTech - insurance & innovation
00:05:30 · Matthew Grant, Richard Gunn
[00:05:30] S1: How do people buy from you? Is it still the pricing platform? You have to buy the pricing platform and they buy the add ons, or are the add ons something people can get in their own right? [00:05:38] S2: It will depend on what their current pain points are. We might have clients who initially want to solve some of their ingestion and triage or are more focused just on the pricing. One of our kind of key differentiators is the fact that we can surface up some of that pricing and rating logic at the point of triage. So typically, we do have early conversations around how that can sit at the center of your ecosystem. Ultimately, we'll work with customers and understand what their priorities are focus on that. [00:06:01] S1: There's so many choices now for companies who they can work with. I mean, also choices about do they go with organizations like yourself now semi established, meaning you've out there for seven, eight years testing it out, there's some people now coming in, good understanding of generative AI, agentic AI, but don't really understand insurance, they can build it themselves. My sense is you sort of fit in the middle there somewhere, which is you've got a track record, you can help people grow, but they're not risking it by starting off with some very smart people that haven't really got understanding of insurance. You've got some smart people and you've built a business now, and now you're responding to the needs to sort of grow beyond that original core functionality just up and down the work stream. Is that a fair way of characterizing it?
00:06:44 · Richard Gunn
[00:06:44] S2: Yeah. I would... A key way that we've differed to other solutions in the market right from day dot is we refer to ourselves sometimes as a pro code platform. So you can log on to our platform, and you can operate in an IDE or development environment where you can actually code and build your own triage, pricing, rating, or portfolio intelligence tools. And therefore, we try to position ourselves as kind of the the best of both in terms of build vBuy to that point there, because you have the flexibility that the specialty and large commercial market demands in terms of being able to engineer for your own edge cases as a specific insurer, reinsurer, or MGA, but then you have that kind of enterprise credibility and confidence from sitting on a platform which has been tried and tested. We have, I think, 60 different clients now collectively writing over $50,000,000,000 of premium on our platform, so there's lots of kind of performance edge cases that have been uncovered and had to be fixed in the meantime, we can give customers that confidence around the enterprise grade engineering, but they can still build their own capabilities on top of it.
00:07:45 · Matthew Grant, Richard Gunn
[00:07:45] S1: 60 clients is actually really impressive. Mean, a lot of companies get stuck, for those that are familiar with the technology adoption curve, or Geoffrey Moore's point about crossing the chasm, where you can be ready for early adopters, but the early majority don't really wanna take the risk. I mean, you're definitely now into mainstream with 60 companies. What's the balance between those that are in The UK where you started off versus in The US? [00:08:06] S2: Yeah, good question. Our largest customer base is already in The US, so about 40% of the premium that's priced on our platform each year is US premium, and that's kind of reflected in how many customers we have in The US as well. That's in part because we were able to sell into The US from The UK very effectively, but also reflects just how much premium there is in in The US market. So when you sell to some of the clients that we can name, likes of Sompo, Unicry, Markel, all US carriers, or recently sold to Bowhead, for example, started partnering with them. Just allows you just to build a lot of traction very quickly. [00:08:39] S1: Some great names. I'm guessing coming originally out of The UK and specifically the under market, where there's a whole different range of lines of business being written that you've either had to or you've been sort of chosen to be very flexible about what lines of business can be run through the tool.
00:08:39 · Matthew Grant, Richard Gunn
[00:08:39] S1: Some great names. I'm guessing coming originally out of The UK and specifically the under market, where there's a whole different range of lines of business being written that you've either had to or you've been sort of chosen to be very flexible about what lines of business can be run through the tool. [00:08:59] S2: Yeah. It's almost like we we look at it. It's got two ends of complexity, and we started at one of the most complex ends, which is the specialty Lloyd's in London market, and are moving down that complexity curve towards solving more for mid market and kind of... We got some clients now starting to use this for some of their flow underwriting in the SME space, for example. So we see that as very much one of our strengths, starting that high underwriting touch, complex lines, and then how do you bring that down to a higher volume business rather than having to solve for it the other way. So that meant it was very natural for us in the first instance to land in the E and S space in The US market. So we initially started to work with carriers in that space, then we've, in the last year, released some more product capabilities for the omitted lines, which are more likely to have slightly different and more predictable approach to pricing, and recently released an omitted market product as well so that we could start to support clients in that space.
00:09:55 · Matthew Grant
[00:09:55] S1: Well, that's the full coverage. So just for those who don't speak insurance, E and S is the excess and surplus lines which are non admitted, but essentially the kind of risks that the admitted insurance carriers, is the kind of mainstream ones who have to get their rates agreed, will choose not to write. So, you're kind of going across the whole gamut from the massive admitted insurance companies where I've potentially got a very good relationship with them, with all the kind of quirky, difficult to underwrite price, but also needed and quite successful. So you've definitely made your mark on mainstream. What advice for people that are currently still in The UK looking to how they grow into The US? Because ultimately any company, particularly on the company that wants to grow or is funded, is going to need to move outside of The UK at some point. Were you successful at selling into The US when you were... Didn't have an office in The US?
00:10:47 · Richard Gunn
[00:10:47] S2: You could probably approach that through two different lenses. One is from a product and one is from a go to market perspective. From a product perspective, what we absolutely found the best approach was to go through your customers. The benefit of the insurance market is that many of the large global players are exactly that. They're global. So you may have landed in Europe, for example. They're likely to have a US operation as well. And therefore, if you can demonstrate success with their European counterparts, I'll give you an opportunity to start to demonstrate how you can support them in The US, at least to get that feedback. We have... We lean into the notion of design partners who will bring clients on as design partners as we build build out new product capabilities. So rather than taking the approach of let's build it, hopefully they will come, let's build it with them so we know that it'll at least meet the needs of our existing customer base. So that's one approach. That's the kind of lowest path to expansion from a product perspective. From a go to market, it's a mix. We actually found very interestingly and almost the opposite of many startups potentially outside of the insurance space and other hyperverticalized businesses. We actually found it easier to sell to the XL global players. And not exactly sure why that is, but my hypothesis is because people working at very large global players are used to speaking with Europeans who maybe are using slightly different nomenclature when they're talking about the underwriting journey than they are when they're speaking to Americans. One of the most obvious ones in our space is pricing and rating mean different things each side of the pond, for example. And actually, big learning for me and my team over the last year was actually understanding how to look and sound American when selling to the non global players, so to selling to still very, very large, very material insurers, reinsurance and MGAs. They might write multibillion dollars of premium, but they aren't inherently a global business. They just sell into The US market. And I do wonder sometimes whether... You know, it's almost been a bit of a social learning for me that if you look and sound the same as someone, people are looking reasons to qualify you in. Whereas if you look and sound different, just kind of seems...