We live in volatile times.
Global factors such as climate events and war overseas can affect anything from the price of food to lead times on electronics.
When it comes to the insurance sector, the effect is magnified: how do you assess risk when the landscape is constantly shifting in so many ways?
Enter Insurwave. The London firm spun out of EY to connect insurance buyers, brokers and insurers on one platform, working with companies to manage their assets such as vessels, aircraft and properties together with their insurance contracts. Changes over time are tracked and the data is shared with the insurers.
Among its clients is Maersk, one of the largest logistics companies in the world. “Keeping track of their exposure changes, declarations, premium adjustments and expected vs received invoices was a manual, time-consuming task for their risk management team, the captive representatives in local entities, their brokers, their insurers and their reinsurers,” outlines Insurwave co-founder and CEO David Power.
“With their brokers, insurers and reinsurers connected to the Insurwave platform, this has eliminated manual data sharing and reconciliation between the parties. Premium adjustments are automated on the platform, allowing Maersk to correctly forecast premium spend across every asset, location and policy for the policy term.
“This is significant when property exposure changes occur at minimum 150 times a year, and war breaches a thousand times annually.”
For Teekay, one of the world’s largest marine energy transportation, storage and production companies, Insurwave’s data management platform digitised its fleet, contract terms and the rules for war zone premium charges.
“These have unlocked many new capabilities for Teekay, their brokers and insurers,” says Power.
“Insurwave connected Teekay with its insurance broker digitally, giving both parties access to the data they need via automated email notifications or on the platform itself.”
Launched in 2018, Insurwave – which featured on our InsurTech 50 ranking late last year – was incubated as a project within professional services giant EY. It sought an investment group to spin out when it was clear that the technology and business had validation in the market.
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Initially a blockchain solution, it later moved to a SaaS offering. “The platform needed to be flexible and adaptable to become a successful client-centric platform,” explains Power. “We measure ourselves on speed to market and providing high-quality platform experiences.
“Against these principles, the initial blockchain stack didn’t scale with our desired flexibility, pace and ambition.”
A former CTO at Wonga, Power says Insurwave has “been doubling its business each year – and we will continue this trend for the next couple of years”.
In December Insurwave announced that it had acquired machine learning technology from EY to advance its approach to providing access to up-to-date, uniform data across all parties in the insurance value chain.
With the new platform, insurers can upload raw data from multiple formats, including Excel and PDF files, and the platform will ingest this data and extract not only structured, but also enhanced data that can be visualised within the platform or uploaded to catastrophe models and pricing engines, ultimately improving underwriter’s speed and quality of decision-making.
“We started in marine and expanded to aviation and property,” says Power. “A natural next step for us is the energy sector.”