In our previous episode we brought you the first half of our event on the 22nd October on Platforms and Ecosystems.
This time we’re back with the second part of the evening and Robin is on stage talking to four companies (three of whom are corporate members and one a start-up), all with very different approaches to providing access to data, analytics from third parties.
Kelly Ward, Sales, Marketing and Distribution Director, AXA Partners (2:10)
Andrew Passfield, CEO and Al Robertson, CTO, ICE InsureTech (9:00)
Mark Dreux, Head of Strategy and Business Development, DMS (16:00)
Jerad Leigh & Ben Rose, Co-Founders, RiskBook (24:00)
You can read the summary of the evening, see photographs from the event and the full agenda here on our past events page.
Listen here to podcast 55. It is also available on iTunes, Spotify and Podbean.
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Transcript for this podcast
00:00 Kelly Ward: We ask customers, if you had a perfect connected home, what would it look like? So we did that and then we priced how much it would cost, and it was over 600 pounds. We then asked them how much they’re willing to pay for it, and it was 127. There’s our problem.
00:22 Matthew Grant: Hello and welcome. Or if you’re regular listener, welcome back. This is the second half of our event on the 22nd of October from the Steelyard when we were talking about platforms and ecosystems, and you’re going to hear from four great more companies. So, first up, we’ve got AXA and then ICE InsureTech, DMS, and finally newcomers RiskBooks. You can hear the first half of that event in our previous podcast when we had with Novidea, Salesforce, and a couple of their partners. Now, if you listen regularly to the podcast, you might notice that we are getting an increasing number of people as guests who are coming from outside of the UK. This episode is no exception. And also, having had a look at the listener statistics, also interesting to see that almost over half of you are listening in from outside of the UK, 25% of you in the US alone. And also based on some of the feedback I’ve had just this week of people who are listening to us as a exercise, I think we have a very healthy audience out there. So if you’re listening to this whilst you’re on your treadmill or out for a run, well, just keep it up.
01:31 MG: Now, we’ve got some great podcasts lined up for you for the rest of the year. You’ll be hearing in a couple of weeks about our life and health event and then some more interviews with some of the people who are making a real difference in the industry from a number of different areas. If you’re not signed up for our newsletter, you might find that quite interesting. We try and bring you things that we think are of specific interest to you, whether insurer or from the technical data and analytic side and give our own perspective on why we are bringing you that information. So you can find that signup on the website at www.instech.london. So on with the show.
02:07 Robin Merttens: There are four more excellent speakers to come, first of which is Kelly Ward, who runs sales and innovation at AXA Partners. Now, we’ve had AXA people here before. We have to start by asking which part of AXA and then what do you do in that part of AXA because it’s opaque from the outside world.
02:31 Kelly Ward: And that’s the actual hardest question I think I’m going to answer tonight. So, AXA Partners is a transversal distribution arm for AXA. We go across around 33 countries. We sit in the innovation unit but with a B2B distributor. So the way I’d like to think of AXA Partners is really a bit like Q in Bond. When someone asks us whether or not we’ve got something, we always say, “I think so. Let me just go out the back and have a look.”
03:05 RM: What are AXA doing in the ecosystems? And what do you see the opportunity as?
03:10 KW: Well, most of my focus is really from the customer point of view. Traditionally, as you all know, the way that insurers have played, we all know how this works. You pay us a premium, something happens or something doesn’t, and we’ll see you again in a year. Sounds a bit like some of the relationships I’ve built over the years. But where I think it’s changing is from a customer perspective, they are increasingly fraught, the problems are getting harder, and their time is getting shorter. So from an ecosystem point of view, the way we are thinking to give you an example is such as the home. The home is now a really complex organism, if you like. Lots of things need fixing. We historically would only come out and fix it if there was event. Why don’t we just do that anyway? Why don’t we solve the problem for customers? So, in answer to your question, the ecosystem I’m thinking about is that person, probably here now, thinking about all the things they need to do in their life. And I think, insurers with insurtechs and others and technology can solve it.
04:18 RM: It’s not to do with risk transfer. It’s be a partner who solves all the problems, or as many of the problems as you can be associated with being a household owner.
04:28 KW: Yeah, we can’t solve all of them, and what insurance does is just gives the customer an option of trading off the risk as they would want. So, give you an example, we’ve been looking at the landlord market, and the challenge there is tenants find it really, really hard to get problems solved quickly for a number of reasons. There is an estate agent that’s involved. There’s the landlord that’s involved. There’s a trades person that’s involved. And then there’s the technology in making all of that happen for the right price, at the right speed, at the right time.
05:04 RM: In reality, how do you do that in the context of a large organization? Are you free to do your own thing? Do you have to do in the context of the right part of AXA? I mean are you doing it with the business? Or are you doing outside of the business?
05:18 KW: I think that’s one of the benefits of AXA Partners and typically why I haven’t been out in the market as much as I would like to be is because I’ve been going out solving problems. So we don’t sit in the main P&C business. We sit independently. We have different governance, and it gives us an ability to be more fleet of foot. Doesn’t mean we’re fast, but it does mean we’re quicker than some of the bigger insurers.
05:46 RM: We keep hearing all the time, put the customer first, know your customer… Is that how it works in reality? Are you looking at what the customer wants and then reverse engineering the solution based on that?
06:02 KW: Yeah. So to give you an example, looked a lot in the connected home market. Seeing a lot of startups come to us as an organization and others as well, solving what they think is the problem. The problem is not that a customer is looking for some exciting tech around their home. The problem is that they want to make the usability and the cost work. So, we asked a couple years ago, the data still valid, we asked customers, “If you had a perfect connected home, what would it look like?”. So we did that and then we priced how much it would cost. And it was over 600 pounds. We then asked them how much they were willing to pay for and it was 127, there’s our problem. How do we solve it? And the answer is, we get better technology, better usability, at cheaper price.
06:50 RM: You’ve mentioned connected homes, is there anything else on the ecosystem world that you’re working on?
06:56 KW: If we simply take what we do on… If you like home insurance and home emergency, if it’s really cold we come out and solve your problem. But why don’t we just remove everything and say, “Actually, if we’ve got a couple of data points, we know where you live, we know what the weather is and what it’s likely to be, then why don’t we have a trade-off in terms of the price versus what we’re going to give you back?”. Cut everything else out, there isn’t a claims journey per se, and then the customer gets the flexibility of what they do.
07:24 RM: So, what next in terms of trends and optimization of the ecosystem opportunity?
07:30 KW: We’ve got start up that’s within the AXA family called Fixter. We run a motor breakdown network, Fixter looks MOT servicing mainly ’cause I’ve had this… The problem it’s solving is waiting at a main dealer for half an hour at the start of the day, 2 hours at the end of the day and then being charged double for the privilege. That is a total exaggeration. But you get a feeling of what I mean by that. What we’re thinking of is, how do we solve some of the problems in this? So, if we have people that can fix things, then a good example would be someone going across to France and their car breaks, why can’t we have a solution that gives their car back to them fixed, as opposed to give them a broken car on their drive.
08:13 RM: Is there anything that you are looking for that you can’t get? Any start uppy idea that you haven’t… You’ve got a captive audience here?
08:23 KW: We’re not sure of offers, in terms of solutions and we do know what our problems are. Quite often we get smaller start-ups, telling us, “Do you know you’ve got a problem?”, “Yes, we do. We’ve been dealing with that problem for quite some time”. I think the answer is, tell us why it’s a problem in the customer’s eyes. Tell us what solution you’ve got and a bit like that connected home evidence that I gave you, tell us how it works commercially. And then answer those points and you have our ear.
08:52 RM: Yeah, fair enough. Really appreciate you coming, Kelly, thanks very much.
[applause]
09:02 RM: Next up, Andrew Passfield CEO. My first question I’m going to ask you is what do I call… Is it ICE InsureTech or is it ICE in InsureTech?
09:14 Andrew Passfield: It’s ICE.
09:15 RM: As in vanilla. Vanilla Ice.
09:16 AP: Vanilla. Vanilla Ice.
09:17 RM: Yes, yes.
09:19 AP: As it comes out of the box.
09:21 RM: As in channelling. That’s marvellous. You’ve been a member for a while, now, for which, thank you, but here’s your chance to tell everybody what you do.
09:28 AP: Thanks. So we’re a software company, we service insurers and MGAs and TPAs in the claims space. We’re fundamentally a platform for those types of organizations. ICE stands for our insurance component environment, so we’ve very much been into this whole ecosystem piece and the idea that we can fit different components together in our ecosystem.
09:54 RM: You call yourself an InsurTech, but I don’t think you are any spring chickens.
10:00 AP: We’ve actually been around since 2004. It’s only over the last couple of years where we’ve been under different ownership structure. And so we’re now part of the Acturis Group where we’ve really seen a lot of growth.
10:13 RM: Is being part of Acturis a good thing?
10:15 AP: We’ve got very complementary systems, they’re obviously a broker software platform. It’s actually a different technology stack, they are focused on… It’s a multi talent 22,000 concurrent use a platform. We are very much focused on insurance and MGAs. We are an instance per client environment, so they are maybe a bit like steering an oil tanker, whereas we are very agile and nimble, and we can drive a lot through configuration and drive a lot of complexity like that.
10:50 RM: What you be simplification to say that they deal with old world and your targeting those people with dynamic new digital models?
11:00 AP: I think they’re an application, they’re very well-established, they’re the market leader in that space, they’re very happy to have us on board. It’s an acquisition they made two years ago, but we’re trying to offer something different, not just to some of the bigger insurers but also to those startups and MGAs as you’ve seen some of the press in the market from us.
11:23 Al Robertson: And I think it’s worth saying that, yes, we’re a policy platform but we’re also firstly, a claims platform, that’s what we started in 2004. And so we were more known for that in the first place, versus Acturis who are obviously very much more focused on sales.
11:41 RM: Am I right, you’re tied up with Munich Re digital partners in some way?
11:45 AP: Yeah, so Munich Re, digital partners are backing a couple of our customers. The one out in the market place at the moment is an organization called Ticker, so a new telematics, we do a lot in the whole telematics and smart home insurance space and actually listening to Kelly just now, one of the things that we focus on from our claims platform, is not necessarily a claims platform, but thinking about it more as an event management platform. So, it doesn’t have to be a claim, it can be an event, it can be a boiler requires servicing, whatever it is. But MRDP, I think, now have faith in us as a trusted implementation partner, and they’re bringing sales opportunities to us which is great from our perspective.
12:31 RM: So from… I read in the AA press release that Deloitte had run a big process to see who AA should choose. And then we know because we’ve had them here before that MRDP don’t mess around and they know what they’re doing on this space. What is it that they saw in you. Why did they pick you when they must have run a quite diligent process?
12:56 AR: I hope it’s because we are… Of our proven record. And actually to let the product speak for itself. So they’re obviously investing in the people and the product, and we have a great combination that has proven, yes, as Andrew says we’ve been doing this for 15 years now.
13:13 AP: And I think it’s also the reference-ability, something that we are very proud of. We have an ex-customer in the audience somewhere and we make sure our customers are 100% positively reference-able.
13:25 RM: Do you partner with other tech companies?
13:27 AR: The ecosystem for us is very much about partnering with additional companies providing data and providing services that can provide a better experience for our clients who are essentially providing platforms for their users and their customers. I would categorize them into two major categories really. One is improving our platform. So a recent example is with Extract 360 who you guys interviewed a couple of months ago.
13:58 RM: Yeah.
14:00 AR: So we’re integrating with companies like that to try and provide a better experience for end users and a lot of different companies. Things like we’ve done a lot with Radar, Willis Towers Watson on Radar Live recently. I think we’re partnering with them and they see as a channel to market as well and we have 150 different implementations out there. The other major category for us in terms of tech partners is the big boys. So we do a lot with Red Hat, we do a lot with Google, Google technologies, Microsoft, big cloud providers, and we have our own hosted platform. Everything is cloud-native for us now so it’s all about containers and APIs and DevOps. So using… Leveraging the big boy infrastructure and capability is really important for us.
14:54 AP: We’re talking about ecosystems tonight… Integration is a tiny piece of an ecosystem. Lots of people can integrate with different partners. One of our competitors was talking earlier about their integration point. But I think for us it’s about us providing a service almost out of the box with a number of these providers. So you don’t need to go and build a direct relationship with company A and company B and company C. We actually have that infrastructure now where companies we almost act as a one-stop shop.
15:23 RM: You got the community here, so anything you need. I mean you look out on the horizon gaps to fill, anything you’re looking for that we could help you with?
15:32 AR: If you have what you think is a unique proposition and you see partnering with a core platform that is, I think, making a bit of waves right now. We have seven new policy clients this year and you see you want maybe another channel to market, come and speak to us.
15:51 RM: Guys, thank you very much. I appreciate it.
16:00 RM: Next up, Digital Matrix Systems. Here we go. Mark is Head of Strategy and Business Development at I’m going to call it DMS. Tell me about it.
16:08 Mark Dreux: Alright. We do data access, we do data storage and we do credit analytics. So we help our clients do those three things to make the business process go more smoothly.
16:19 RM: Can I wrap that up as sort of data management in the broad… Data management in the broadest sense with built-in analytics?
16:27 MD: Largely for underwriting. So, we don’t play on the claims side. If you’re doing SME, SMB, If you’re doing consumer, if you’re doing banking, if you’re doing lending, if you’re doing anything in the insurance space we really help in the overall underwriting space.
16:43 RM: So part of your job is to take the data once you’re managed… Managing it and turn it into, well, let’s say underwriter specific insights. So it’s an insurance-specific way of taking data and making insurance-specific usage of it, would that be fair?
17:02 MD: Absolutely right. So we’re trying to make it so that if there are 10, 20, 30 data sources out there that you as the insurer want to work with, we’re trying to make it where you build one pipe to us, we take on connecting to all these different data sources. We’re going to try to normalize them as much as you can normalize stuff so that when you’re ingesting it you’re only connecting to one place, and when you’re doing analytics on top of it or when you’re combing through it on the back end, you’re always going to the same fields. So if you’re an insurance carrier and you’re working with Equifax and you’re wanting to move to Experian, one of the things we’re trying to do is make it where, one you can do it more quickly, you can do it more seamlessly, but also when you’re building your next model you’re not spending as much time relearning the data.
17:46 RM: So you’re taking an insurance company’s data and adding external sources of data. And are those chosen by the company or chosen by you. In other words, have you got lots of exciting external data sources that your customers can make use of?
18:00 MD: Currently in North America we support about 40 data sources. And one of the reasons we’ve been over here and we’ve come over here about four or five times in the last two years is to one, understand does this service exist? Is there something out there where I can call… It sounds like you guys have been building something like that, where you can call out, get to a bunch of different data sources all for underwriting and do all of your analytics and all of your data management in one place. So on the States side we work with about 40 data sources, about 20 or 30 different loan origination and policy admin systems. So we do work with Guidewire. We’re not one of their, I think they call it accelerators. But we have about six different carriers that we’ve built kind of in between Guidewire with.
18:43 RM: And because we are all about cool here, which of your data sources is the one… I mean… I don’t want any old data source. What’s cool out there?
18:53 MD: We launched a product in June called test drive. And it’s exactly that it lets our clients test drive data. So it’s kind of cute. I couldn’t believe we got it through the patent office to be really honest with you. But really what it does is it let’s existing DMS clients and data sources that we’ve onboard test and sort of take the legal hurdle out, so we’re trying to short via third party processing that can get in the way, and let insurers test data more quickly, before they choose to buy it.
19:22 RM: I like it. Are you allowed to say who your main clients are?
19:26 MD: Well, we’ve got a few hundred in North America, and those range from banking and insurance and also auto lending. So it kind of broadens the spectrum. I would say our clients are bigger small institutions that are interested in extracting more value out of data.
19:43 RM: What brings you to the UK?
19:44 MD: Two very large US based companies asking if we can pick up and deploy. So while the answer is always yes, when it’s a big company at the same time you say yes to the wrong big company, you’ve just shot yourself in the foot. So we have been spending a couple years trying to find out what’s out there, where it makes the most sense, where there’s the most portability. It seems like the SME SMB space is where there could the idea of quickly getting to consumer data, DueDil, BVD, Dun and Bradstreet, Experian commercial bouncing around between 7-10 different data sources, not only through one pipe but being able to do analytics on top of it, route, that type of thing.
20:22 RM: I really like the proposition but how’s it being used at its very best? I mean, how’s it…
20:27 MD: Yeah, this actually came up this morning, we were… So the owner and founder of DMS is sitting up here also. We were with a carrier today, very big carrier. And they were talking about the difference between the SMB space and the middle market space and they were saying that in both venues, they will manually underwrite 100%. And I was a little bit blown away ’cause stateside, it’s not like that. And he said that they’re trying to get to a point where it’s more like 80%, at least on those SMB side. And what we do is we really do start to look at, if you’re Joe’s pizza shop and you’re looking to underwrite Joe’s pizza shop, why are you pulling a Dun and Bradstreet report? And that’s not to knock Dun and Bradstreet, it’s just not going to show up. So whether it’s understanding Cortera or BVD or DueDil or even the sole proprietors consumer credit. How do you get down to that level to make an actionable decent decision?
21:22 RM: You’ve got an audience of tech evangelists, anything that you could think, that you could leverage them for?
21:30 MD: If there’s a carrier that thinks it’s useful, if there’s a data source that would want to be a part of it. I’m Mark, I’m with DMS and we’re here to figure out if we make sense in your country.
21:39 RM: Mark, thank you. We got time for one question.
21:43 Audience question: Hi there, Simon here, it’s NextGen Communications. Just to ask. So you’re looking at the SME space. Are you also considering personal lines?
21:52 MD: Yes, absolutely. One of the things that we’ve had a lot of experience in would be, what we call the state’s, the DOY. So we have to help kind of get complex, create different models, bounce around more quickly. And we do have some tools that really helped with that. So it’s nice here that you guys are able to adjust your rates a little bit more freely. And I think we’ve got some tools that would really help with that.
22:14 RM: One more, if there is one.
22:15 Audience question: You’ve got a very data rich market in what I call the excited states. But the United States, you have a very data rich market. What are your envisaged challenges in the short time that you’ve been here about the way that you can access data between here and Europe? And what’s your outlook as far as more emerging economies is concerned?
22:39 MD: Sure. So I think the first time I came was about three years ago and the initial idea was to stand up a facility here because we could get all of the EU. We started to learn about GDPR, we have a couple of what we have quite a few US based companies that do business on both sides. So when you’re talking about major financial institutions, they start to throw some of those regulations on us anyway. So we started to learn a little bit about that. But we were pretty excited because we could figure we’d get United Kingdom, we’d get Europe, etcetera, that maybe we can start looking at pulling in data like CRIF on the consumer credit side, you can start to really expand the reach, looks like that doors changing a little bit. But at the same time, we have 40 data sources in the US. And the reason we’ve got 40 and not 140 is it’s largely client driven. So as you onboard a DMS, you’re able to help drive our strategy. One of the things that we’re looking to do though, is just to make sure that we know all the data sources that are out there, so it’d be kind of fun to get to learn those here as well.
23:39 RM: Brilliant Mark, really appreciate your time.
23:43 MD: Thank you.
23:43 RM: Thanks for coming along. Thank you very much.
23:50 RM: Next up, we have a double act. These guys will be pretty well known to many of you. They’re good friends of Instech London, Ben Rose and Jerad Leigh. Welcome, guys. So your sort of new kids on the block, Riskbook. What is it? And why did you leave promising careers to found it?
24:14 Jared Leigh: Yeah, So Riskbook at its core is a global reinsurance marketplace. What we’re primarily focused on is improving the working lives of brokers and underwriters around the world. We’re often referred to as the right move for reinsurance. And I think that analogy lends itself really nicely in the fact that an agent or a broker is now able to move beyond their shop window and create a digital risk that sort of the world of buyers can seek out and sort and filter. When I was a broker. We had sort of two problems, one was managing really large placements. With a lot of underwriters on them, but the other side was if we had a particularly unique risk, there was this reliance on our personal networks in order to find the right capacity for that piece of business.
24:58 Ben Rose: And I think I had exactly the opposite set of problems on the underwriter side. A lot of people here know me from Aon but actually, before that, I was a treaty underwriter. And we would literally spend all of our energy wining and dining and networking and conferencing in the hope that one of those people would remember us so that when we went and sat back at our box, just sort of waited in the hope that somebody would be like, “Oh yeah, they really wanted some Caribbean agriculture or something.” They might bring you something that you actually wanted but that rarely happened. You normally ate what you were given. So we thought there’s an opportunity to make this more proactive, get this hyper-connective world where you can actually go searching and filtering, to find the risks you’re interested in, which enables you to offer better prices ’cause you’re actively diversifying your portfolio and growing where you want to instead of just writing the same old stuff you’re given all the time.
25:47 RM: I don’t want to trivialize it, but is that sort of a dating agency? Are you trying to match appetite with demand across a diversified portfolio? Does that… Is that fair?
26:01 BR: As long as you’re allowed to have multiple partners, yes.
26:04 RM: We live in the polygamous world here.
26:08 RM: So you’ve just raised some money, well done. It’s not easy in this environment, so what are you going to spend it all on?
26:14 BR: It’s a good question. We had a lot of fun with our fundraise because we were building a marketplace and as you know, as many others know, it’s quite difficult to do so, especially if you make a mistake of affiliating yourself too closely to either any one large party or any group of large parties because obviously that instantly puts off all their competitors or the other side of the coin. So we went out fundraising saying no to all of the insurance back VCs or all of the broker-owned VCs and so on. So initially, we started fundraising with Angels, say thank you to all of our Angels who enabled us to recruit our early team. So Jezen and our CTO is here in the front row. He’s helped build everything. But we were able to take on a couple of devs gradually that angel community snowballed as people said, “Yes this is obvious, why doesn’t this exist already?” And most recently, we’ve now managed to double our Angel funding with VC funding as well, so we’re currently this morning and all of this week, going through Basecamp, which is the mini accelerator program run by SID Camp. So they’ve got a wonderful portfolio of companies you may have heard of like Transfer-wise and Revolute as we’re proud to be among their cohort and we’ll do our best to deliver up to their expectations.
27:29 RM: Well done. I reckon you have some experience of building transactional platforms and I think The Tech is not easy, but my experience tells me that getting liquidity or the transactional support with business, to give you is more difficult. How’s that looking? Are you encouraged by the support you’ve got?
27:55 JL: Yeah, when we looked at how this marketplace might work, one of the first things we did was think about the challenge of liquidity, and why it’s been so hard to get this marketplace model off the ground, to Ben’s point, affiliating too close with any one party was an important element of that. But I think more so was this idea that solutions were built for a specific geography or a specific line of business contrary to what Starbucks might think, reinsurance is a lot more than just property cat. And it’s a lot more than just a few hubs in the world, and we sort of built a solution intentionally flexible to be agnostic to geography into line of business, from the start. And then we’re focusing on the long tail of brokers. Again, another contrarian position we hold is the role the broker will play will be incredibly valuable for the foreseeable future and we wanted to target that long tail of brokers who don’t have a solution thus far, and that’s enormously valuable for underwriting partners as well who spent a lot of time and energy with the big brokers and sort of ignore the deal flow in the smaller firm. So, trying to focus on that liquidity start.
29:02 BR: Yeah, I think certainly we spend a lot of time where we met actually AON in-point. I think there’s a couple of people here from our old shop. I, advising reinsurers and typically your growth strategy was either route one, how do I do more business with the big brokers? Or route two, how do I go through the huge operational constraints of setting up new offices in a new country? You need this many underwriters. We were all going to have lunch with this many brokers in these many regions and so on, so we don’t need that nowadays. You can hyper-connect into new regions and dabble in geographies and lines of business that you haven’t done traditionally so much more easily.
29:37 RM: Do you think the big brokers will play nicely?
29:40 JL: We think so. Our focus is on the smaller firms because they’re the ones who are lacking any sort of solution thus far, but we’re building out our APIs to plug into those bigger firms and we see ourselves maybe as a more holistic solution for a smaller firm, and then part of a bigger pie for the bigger firm. So last week, we ran a global event with the under 35s here in London, simultaneously with the under 40s in the United States and in that event we had some gamification and some elements of competitive nature built into that, but users from two of the biggest brokers in the world which will go unnamed, was sort of in the leader board of being very involved and very interested in what we’re doing. So as much as they’re not our early focus, they’ve been very much in conversations with us at this point.
30:26 RM: So it’s under 25, where you start to find people who will actually engage with this stuff and over 25 they don’t play, whereas in America, they’ll play up to 40, is that… How does that work?
30:35 BR: We have been using avocado toast to attract our users but yeah.
30:38 RM: Thank you. You have got to be very, very adept at answering this question before long. But where does this fit with the future of Lloyds and blueprints and all that kind of stuff?
30:48 BR: It’s a great question. So I initially actually started out my career at Lloyds. I went through the internship and graduate programs. I spent a lot of time in their strategy team working on the Lloyd’s index before that came out and various other things. And the thing I came away from that… The most aware of was the limited levers actually available to Lloyds to take big decisions without upsetting various members and parties involved in their huge ecosystem, and that’s informed our approach quite a lot. We know that they’ve got a really big challenge and we’re really thrilled to see the attitude that they’re taking going forward and excited to see where that goes. But because the core of reinsurance is global diversified markets, our strategy has to be for Lloyds then it goes before the whole world as well. So we really are hoping that our solution will meet the needs and be responsive to some of the exciting things we’re seeing in the future of Lloyds blueprint etcetera. But in reality, we’re building something for re-insurers whether they be in Bermuda and Singapore and brokers in the US and Lloyds and beyond. So it’s really a global solution.
31:54 RM: I should ask you this, when are you going live?
32:00 BR: I was hoping someone would give me a Britney Spears microphone.
32:02 RM: Yeah, no.
32:02 BR: But I think, April roughly, we’ve had a couple of soft punches already to test the market and get a feedback but April-ish, don’t hold me to that.
32:13 RM: You heard it here first, get ready.
32:16 RM: Again, you know this community well, anything you need, what can we help you with?
32:21 BR: So at the moment, as we mentioned, we’ve got a basic community now about 150 users, from about… I think we’re now in 50 firms which is quite exciting, so really a diverse mix of people. But every person individually is bringing a huge amount of feedback and ideas that’s really helping us solve their real pain points, especially as we’re focusing on actual brokers and underwriters. This isn’t being built in a cupboard. So if you are part of a group and even if you’re not a reinsurer yourself we’re getting some amazing feedback from insurance people who place very large risks that basically look the same as reinsurance contracts and they’re saying, “When’s it going to be ready for insurance? When’s it going to be ready for insurance?” Which is exciting for us to plan for as well. But at the moment if you know anybody who’s in the reinsurance space or you’re just curious, we’re always looking to come and demo for you, hear your feedback so that we can make sure we build the tools that are going to be useful to you, the real user going forward.
33:14 JL: And to that point, our beta is open now so if you just go to riskbook.com, you’re going to be able to log in. Most companies are set up, some smaller firms might not be, but we’ll set that up and give you access now. So again, there’s built-in feedback so just feel free to play around, give us feedback. We’re building the tool for the users, there’s value for the executive teams and everything there, but we want to make the lives of people who are actually placed in the business far easier.
33:39 RM: Because anyone who wants to ask you a question can do so at the bar, I’m going to put that bit back, but we wish you the best of luck. Sounds a really exciting thing.
33:47 JL: Thank you.
33:48 RM: Good luck.
33:48 BR: Thanks for having us.
33:56 Matthew Grant: Well, that about wraps it up. If you’ve enjoyed what you’ve heard here you can find out more about what we’re up to at www.instech.london. If you’ve got ideas of people you’d like to hear on the podcast or if indeed, you’d like to join us yourself then please drop me a line at [email protected], and you can find out everything else you need to know from the website.
Listen here to podcast 55. It is also available on iTunes, Spotify and Podbean.
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