InsTech London’s Ali Smedley talks to Kevin Crawford, Senior Vice President – Global Head of Insurance Delivery about Endava’s service offerings, no-code/low-code platforms and market opportunities for insurers.
Ali: What is your role as lead of global delivery operations at Endava?
Kevin: I work with a team of delivery partners, who in turn work with our nearshore and onshore teams delivering IT services to our insurance clients.
Ali: What is the history of Endava?
Kevin: Headquartered in London, Endava has grown consistently year on year. The company has over 8,000 employees across the world, and we have delivery centres in the EU and Latin America. We continue to grow through acquisitions of businesses. Endava has acquired six organisations in the last five years.
A significant part of Endava’s business is working Specialty, Commercial, Personal lines and Life & Pensions insurance markets.
Ali: What problem is Endava solving?
Kevin: The key themes are often focused around 3 business objectives: improving operational efficiency, increasing distribution and making underwriting more profitable.
Ali: How are your insurance clients working with you?
Kevin: Our service offering includes product strategy, design, innovation workshops and User Experience (UX). We also offer testing, DevOps and application management. Some of our clients use one service, such as using us as an automated testing or development partner, whilst others may use all our services. What’s paramount in our approach is that we are a ‘do with’ and not a ‘do to’ partner – our clients are not outsourcing the critical knowledge of how to run their business.
Typical examples of projects include the development of bespoke data-driven underwriting workbenches, automating legacy processes using RPA (robotic process automation) and configuring and implementing new underwriting products on platforms such as Sequel’s Rulebook.
Ali: What do you think are the most interesting areas of innovation Endava is working on?
Kevin: Some of the most interesting projects are where we are working with our clients to build their next generation platforms. We look at the most pragmatic way of delivering incremental change. We do not believe that implementing a monolithic platform is ever going to bring competitive advantage.
On the flipside, developing everything in-house is expensive. We therefore build hybrid solutions, enabling us to work with some great insurtech organisations. We are seeing particularly interesting themes emerge around getting automation into the Workbench and changes in payments within insurance, for example.
Ali: What are examples of customers Endava is working with?
Kevin: Our customers span the London specialty markets, Personal lines, Commercial and Life & Pensions, across the UK, US, Europe and Asia Pacific regions. Examples include Beazley and esure.
Ali: Where are the biggest areas of opportunity?
Kevin: One of the biggest opportunities we see for insurers now is to better utilise the large amounts of data that they have access to. This could be to better detect fraud, make better underwriting decisions or to streamline and automate core processes. With the availability of internal and external data sources we believe the opportunities and return on investment are huge.
Ali: What new areas is Endava expanding into?
Kevin: One area that we have moved into over the last 12 months is on low code/no code platforms. These techniques are being used to get new products to market quickly and to allow for agility as you noted in the InsTech London No-Code/Low-Code Platforms report produced in early 2021. To meet the growing demand for these platforms we have created a specialist internship programme, focusing on how to successfully configure and deploy insurance applications.
Ali: Why did Endava join InsTech London
Kevin: When speaking with customers and defining propositions, it’s important for us to understand what the range of solutions there are out there. Several of us at Endava have attended excellent InsTech London events before and partnering with InsTech will give us greater access to insights and research, as well as the opportunity to collaborate with the wider network.
Ali: What kind of companies would Endava like to connect with?
Kevin: We want to connect with any company that provides a solution to business problems that we are engaging our clients with. We would also be interested in talking with insurtechs that require partners to help them integrate their solutions into their client’s architecture or require help building and enhancing their insurtech offerings in the first place.
For more information on Endava, go to endava.com