AEGIS London: Driving broker success with digital platforms

Calum Williams started off as a broker in terror and political violence insurance, joining AEGIS London six years ago as a terrorism underwriter. In 2022 he moved to the AEGIS London’s Digital Trading division and today Calum has responsibility for the development and distribution of new insurance products through the company’s digital platform OPAL.

Calum and his team find new products to offer through OPAL from two sources. The first is digitising existing insurance products within AEGIS London. The second is working with underwriters to create new products specifically to put on the platform.

Ideas for new products come from market research and in particular brokers and MGAs that are working with AEGIS London in the market. “Distribution is important. We regularly talk to the brokers for validation of potential demand for the products that AEGIS London is thinking about offering through OPAL” says Calum.

This discussion continues with the brokers after the products are released on the platform, to learn from the brokers experience and encourage them to be proactive. Calum says, “we make sure they’re aware of the products we offer and how the products work. We need to get them to log on to the platform and buy the product for their clients, and this is why product fit and validating product demand is so important.”

OPAL was developed in 2017. Initially it was launched as a proof of concept. At the time, one of the products that AEGIS offered in London was a coverage called a “wind deductible buy down”. 

A “wind deductible buy down” is an insurance product that helps to reduce wind and hurricane deductibles imposed by an insured’s property policy. This product can sit below both a surplus lines and admitted carriers product, and to a level that the overlying insurance carrier may not be prepared to go, or importantly, lenders are prepared to accept.₁ There was a big opportunity, as a large portion of business for smaller accounts never came into London because the frictional cost of doing business was too high for the traditionally manual placement process. 

OPAL was designed to make access to the London Market cheaper, efficient and fast but never intended to displace the role of the brokers. It proved to be a success right from the start with premium volumes far exceeding initial expectations.

The original hypothesis about market need has remained valid and AEGIS London has continued to add more products onto the platform. The most important criteria for success for a new digital product is that brokers and their customers have a clear need for the type of insurance protection that is being offered. AEGIS London continues to carefully vet ideas from underwriters for new products through market testing and feedback.

Success can come with challenges though, as Calum recounts: “The first version of OPAL was no more than a proof of concept and was built in partnership with an external consultant. This initial insurance product was so popular it almost became a victim of his own success. The premium volumes that were going through the platform exceeded what the platform was designed to handle. The other problem was that we couldn’t really make any changes to the products ourselves and bringing new products to market was slow”

So AEGIS London rebuilt its platform to create more scale and more flexibility. This has also opened up the opportunity to create more connectivity with other platforms.”We recognised that brokers were building their own front end platforms, and they would want those platforms to connect with four, or five, maybe more different underwriting platforms, all of which would be offering different products, or offering the same products, but quoting different prices”. 

AEGIS London wanted to ensure that it gave different options to brokers by having API capabilities to easily integrate with the broker platforms. This new release of the platform has also allowed AEGIS London to build and launch new products relatively quickly, and make changes to existing products.

North America is the one of the largest markets for AEGIS London but it has never tried to sell directly into that market. The London broker plays an essential role. “We’re giving brokers more options of what to offer as well as making London more accessible to more clients in the US and Canada using technology and digital distribution.

With the success of the wind deductible buydown cover, the second product launched was a stand alone terrorism product as an alternative to the US government backed TRIA programme. Other products now offered through OPAL include a specie, fine art and jewelry cover, coverage for vacant land and vacant property, and liability product for Energy Consultants and a wind deductible buy down product for homeowners.

Calum and his colleagues at AEGIS London are looking for ways to build on their success offering coverage in the US property space. At the same time, they are encouraged by the take-up for coverage that are new classes for the insurer, which are only being made available digitally through OPAL.

To do this effectively, though, AEGIS London needs to ensure that it is talking to the brokers placing these lines of business, and that often means marketing to and educating an entirely new group of people. “We think that digital is a much more efficient way of distributing many more of our products and makes business ‘stickier’ so we are also going to focus on digitising existing books of business with a view to putting more of those products onto OPAL”.

AEGIS London knows that it is important to give the broker and clients choice. “We’re not saying to them you have to use OPAL but we do say that if you want to use it, you can access our products more easily,” adding “But if a broker still wants to go down the traditional route, with a more direct face-to-face contact, they will have that option available as well”.

For Calum, the success of OPAL has come about by having simple products and making the user experience as easy as possible.

The user experience of the brokers is also very important: “the biggest feedback we get is that it is such an easy platform to use, very intuitive.” AEGIS London wants to make the user journey even easier if possible. “If we don’t have to ask a broker to input data that we can get from somewhere else, and offer reliable prefill, then that reduces the speed of getting a quote”.

Before OPAL was built, the AEGIS London team had to spend a lot of time traveling out to the US to meet new coverholders and new MGAs. Building on its digital success, AEGIS London has begun now to step up its digital marketing too. There is a new website for the platform which has information about each of the products and information including explainer videos. As a surplus lines products provider, AEGIS London is restricted in how much marketing it can do and Lloyd’s rules prohibit them going direct to insureds or individuals so the website is targeted at brokers that are allowed to distribute and sell the AEGIS London offering.

As it becomes more acceptable for brokers to transact business using a digital platform AEGIS London expects to see more brokers come to OPAL. More brokers are developing their own front end digital platforms, and then connecting these via an API to the various complementary underwriter digital platforms available. This means that a broker can logon to their platform and then be able to access five or six different products at one time. Ultimately Calum is in favour of this: “I think that’s only going to benefit us. Whilst there’s more competition in the market for our particular products that we’re selling. We see it as a beneficial thing that there’s more digital platforms available as a whole in the market and trading digitally becomes more widely adopted brokers”.

AEGIS London is in the process of building capability in OPAL to offer third party products through the platform. There is an opportunity to offer more products to an existing audience of brokers that are already frequent OPAL users. “We’re exploring how we can do that”, explains Calum “we have started building third party products and that is something that we want to delve into more and more going forward”.

In addition to growing the volume of use and the variety of products on OPAL, AEGIS London is now in an excellent position to learn from the data that has been collected within the platform and share its findings with their placing brokers. The lessons learned and trends identified will help refine future product offerings. Calum knows that offering ancillary services of this kind will really help to provide value and encourage more activity with AEGIS London broker partners.

₁Lenders might be uncomfortable with their client (i.e. the insured) retaining so much risk imposed by their original property insurance carriers which may have imposed a large deductible. The insured is now able to purchase AEGIS London’s “wind deductible buy down” policy to reduce their deductibles and ensure their insurance complies with the requirements of their lender.