Where is the re/insurance industry making the most inroads with technology?

“I think, quite often, technology – especially GenAI – is the answer before anyone’s really thought about what the question is.” Sharing his thoughts on where the re/insurance industry is going right – and wrong – when it comes to technology, including GenAI, Paul Templar, CEO of VIPR highlighted that this emerging technology is one of the topics he’s hearing dominating discussions today.

GenAI represents a significant opportunity for the industry, he said, but it’s critical for market participants to find the right use cases – and to take stock of what is and isn’t working.

“Generally speaking, where we’re seeing the most impact with our customers is when they’re taking a look at their current processes, really taking a step back and understanding where they might be able to improve or streamline those processes, but then also introducing things like automation into their workflow,” Templar said.

“And, of course, GenAI may have a really good role to play within that, but really it’s in things like data ingestion, data processing – all those things that are quite manual and take time – and actually being able to introduce some automation to those things to really helping to streamline that flow.”

How AI is supporting submissions  

Alan Rodrigues, CEO of Banyan Excess Liability Ltd,  said that his team has noticed a large influx of new submissions coming into Bermuda. With AI, the team is able to process those a lot more efficiently, he said, and to do the necessary research into the complex exposures related to this business, boosting their efficiency as underwriters.

Tim Usher-Jones noted that as co-CEO of Banyan Risk, a firm that launched in 2021, it’s hard to say where the market is going wrong as Banyan is a digitally-native, paperless business with all the inherent flexibility that comes with that. “One of the best things we’ve tried is just experimenting, and making sure there’s accountability and there’s someone in charge of what you’re trying to do,” Usher-Jones said.

“[Then] you can run experiments quickly and fail fast. That’s an easy thing to say, but it’s a very hard thing to do in a large organization. In Banyan, we’re nimble and fast, as an example, the rating models we’ve built would have taken us years inside of a large organization.” By leveraging new technologies, the firm has been able to open up its availability to work with a range of different providers.

“We think insurance in the future is SaaS. The entire world has gone to a SaaS model,” Usher-Jones said. “Warehousing those people in-house is a bit like trying to build Microsoft Office. There are so many fantastic providers, and some of them are outside insurance. We think that all the best technology is inside insurance but the truth is, we’re finding fantastic talent outside of insurance who love to take a challenge on.”

There are so many exciting applications of technology, he said, including integrating GenAI into underwriting processes to reduce the administrative burden on underwriters. “Being able to ask a very highly trained generative AI system the right questions is almost as big a skill as underwriting itself… The world’s changing, it’s just whether everyone can keep up, and we’re doing as best as we can to get ahead of the curve.”

How AI can build on a strong standardized foundation 

With 36,000 members spread across brokers, carriers, reinsurers, and technology vendors in over 100 countries, ACORD has a pretty clear insight into what’s happening on the technology and digitalisation front, according to Chris Newman, president, international. Having been in the industry for 30-plus years, he said, he has seen the varying levels of successful adoption among participants.

“For me, one of the fundamental positives that seems to be coming out of the industry is an understanding that to do digitalization and do it correctly, you need to really have a foundational base layer, which is standardization,” Newman said. The re/insurance community recognizes the value of standards and the efficiencies they can bring in terms of data quality, the speeding up of processes and the elimination of unallocated cash. “So, we’re talking about some significant cost savings, across the industry.”

These standards cover the full lifecycle of the insurance proposition, from placing, accounting and claims. As a result, they don’t only result in efficiency gains for an organization but also open up opportunities to start distributing products on a more global basis, backed by a consistent framework. With that foundational level in place, companies can then start the automation of processes, as complemented by the newer technologies that now exist in the market.

“Clearly GenAI is a significant game changer [enabling] you to ultimately start to look at non-standardized data and standardize that in terms of intake and submissions, and then to share that data in a standardized way,” he said. “And I think the industry globally has woken up to that and its benefits… I think there is now an opportunity to drive the adoption of those standards and complement them with technology as well. It seems, certainly from my perspective, that we’re the furthest forward we’ve ever been in the specialty industry to start driving that change.”