Staying Ahead of the Game – Stephen Catlin, Chairman & CEO, Convex, and Paul Brand, Deputy CEO, Convex

This week’s The Voice of Insurance podcast has not one but two guests, Stephen Catlin, Chairman and CEO, Convex, and Paul Brand, Deputy CEO, Convex. Colleagues for over 30 years, Stephen and Paul head one of the largest and best-placed new businesses in the market. In this chat, we hear them speak at length about the company’s journey, where they are investing capital and how to build a dynamic workplace during a pandemic.

Convex has been described as a “first of its kind” carrier that is doing things differently, taking full advantage of innovative technology and outsourced services. Baggage-free in terms of technology, process, and liability, Convex was in the enviable position of starting with a clean slate and headed by a team of people with years of experience.

In this episode, we hear how Stephen and Paul are building a global specialty insurer and reinsurer, concentrating on complex, high-value risk and offering a differentiated service proposition team to clients and brokers.

Working flat out

Interviewer Mark Geoghegan asks how technology and digital innovation fit into the company’s strategy. Both Stephen and Paul describe how Convex is a digitally enabled insurer that strengthens its underwriting process by using technology, AI, and big data to achieve a more accurate view of risk while helping underwriters improve risk selection.

Paul describes how Convex has a business called Digital Underwriting that engages with distribution to largely look at automatic underwriting across the insurance value chain.

Algorithmic underwriting

When asked about algorithmic underwriting, Stephen and Paul are clear that digital underwriting is here to stay.

However, Stephen points out that human involvement in the underwriting decision process will always be required, “I can’t see how you’ll ever going to replace human intervention with algorithms in that circumstance.”

When asked how Convex combines digital underwriting in its decision making process, Stephen says, “our alpha, if you like, is actually where human intervention is required but at the same time taking benefit of technological advancement and better use of data and data capture.”

As the conversation turns to data capture and whether the market is doing a good enough job in capturing the right data, Paul comments that in the future, individuals will be supported by a lot more data and technology, but as things get more complex, the human element will be vital. Commenting specifically on data usage, Paul says:

Speaking about the future of data capture, Stephen says “the question to ask ourselves as you look forward 10 years is where do you need human intervention, where will you always need human intervention and when does human intervention become superfluous, costly and less effective so that the capture of data will increasingly need less and less human intervention.”

We highly recommend you listen to this insightful podcast.