When people hear me talk about ‘suits, trainers and cool tools’, it usually makes them think of a dress code rather than a business strategy.
But, to me, it’s become the simplest way I can explain what’s driven Uinsure’s growth over the past six years.
When I joined Uinsure in 2020, founder and CEO Simon Taylor had already created a strong platform with enormous potential.
He saw that home insurance didn’t need another intermediary.
Instead, it needed a technology platform that made buying insurance simpler for customers, advisers and insurers alike.
My focus was on bringing commercial rigour, thinking about what would come next for the business and how to build the operational foundations to scale.
Scaling the business
Cut to today, and Uinsure is an industry-leading InsurTech and cloud-based technology platform which connects financial intermediaries and lenders with a panel of the UK’s leading insurers, using industry-leading technology to compare premiums and streamline the process of arranging cover alongside mortgage applications.
We’ve grown from a team of 40 to around 230 people, roughly half of whom are engineers and data scientists.
We work with the majority of UK mortgage intermediaries and, since 2020, have grown revenue by 20 per cent year-on-year to £40m in 2026.
In 2023, we launched Uinsure CX, a new technology which allows firms and partners to automate insurance quotes and drive engagement at key moments in the mortgage journey, with the ability to purchase insurance digitally.
This was a gamechanger for us and made Uinsure the first platform in the UK that can track an individual’s mortgage progress and provide fully automated communications during the process.
We partnered with LDC in 2024, earlier than we’d originally planned to bring in a private equity partner, because we realised the business was ready for its next phase of growth.
Their investment was important, of course, but equally valuable was the experience and perspective they brought as we continued to scale.
That brings me back to ‘suits, trainers and cool tools’.
The suits are the commercial leaders who understand strategy, regulation and customers.
The trainers are our engineers and data scientists, constantly improving the platform and solving problems in new ways.
Then there are the cool tools – particularly AI – helping both groups to spend more time on the work that creates the most value.
Putting the cool tools to work
AI is dramatically changing the speed at which we can deliver. Our integration with Virgin Money, for example, went live in four-and-a-half months, compared with the two-year timeline that has traditionally been accepted across financial services.
Within Uinsure, we’re continuing to challenge long-established habits across the business, starting with our leadership team.
Rather than defaulting to creating presentations or spreadsheets manually, we use AI first.
The point isn’t to switch for the sake of it. It’s to cut down on repetitive work so our teams can spend more time thinking and collaborating to solve problems.
That matters even more in a regulated industry like insurance.
AI can process information in seconds, but it doesn’t understand context on its own – that’s where human experience and judgement come in.
In fact, I believe AI will make experienced professionals more valuable, not less, because they’ll continue to be the ones who know how to ask the right questions and to interpret the answers.
Alongside our use of AI, our broader approach is reflected in partnerships spanning banks and building societies, intermediaries and insurers.
By the end of this year, we will have onboarded two of the UK’s top five banks and a major retailer, including NatWest Group, which went live in July.
With NatWest, we launched their new home insurance proposition that delivers quotes in a matter of seconds and uses our Insurance Tracker technology – a UK banking first that monitors customers’ policies throughout the year and proactively contacts them if a better price or policy becomes available.
On the intermediary side, there have been significant developments that reflect our investment in the adviser market, with Openwork appointing Uinsure to its panel and Primis Mortgage Network adding Uinsure as a sole-tie option for its advisers, giving them the choice to consolidate their general insurance proposition with a single partner.
We also welcomed Lloyds Bank General Insurance to our insurer panel, giving advisers using Uinsure exclusive access to its home insurance products through the intermediary market.
These partnerships demonstrate what becomes possible when technology, innovation and commercial focus come together.
So, for me, the real lesson from the last six years is that scaling a business is about bringing together different perspectives, different skills and the right partners at the right time.
Get the suits, the trainers and the cool tools working together, and you create something that’s far more powerful than any one of them could achieve alone.