{"id":6617,"date":"2024-03-15T07:54:13","date_gmt":"2024-03-15T07:54:13","guid":{"rendered":"httpss:\/\/www.advantagego.com\/?p=6617"},"modified":"2025-03-26T04:10:51","modified_gmt":"2025-03-26T04:10:51","slug":"voi-podcast-with-kate-markham-ceo-of-hiscox-london-market","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.advantagego.com\/en-us\/content\/voi-podcast-with-kate-markham-ceo-of-hiscox-london-market\/","title":{"rendered":"Investing in underwriting technology"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p><iframe title=\"Kate Markham Hiscox: Do More, Do it Better, Do it Cheaper\" allowtransparency=\"true\" height=\"150\" width=\"100%\" style=\"border: none; min-width: min(100%, 430px);height:150px;\" scrolling=\"no\" data-name=\"pb-iframe-player\" src=\"https:\/\/www.podbean.com\/player-v2\/?i=6uda3-15a7bbb-pb&amp;from=pb6admin&amp;share=0&amp;download=1&amp;rtl=0&amp;fonts=Tahoma&amp;skin=3267a3&amp;font-color=&amp;logo_link=episode_page&amp;btn-skin=1b1b1b\" loading=\"lazy\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Kate Markham, CEO of Hiscox London Market, featured on the latest episode of the Voice of Insurance podcast.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In the final quarter of 2023, Hiscox London Market undertook a proof of concept with Google Cloud, to see how its lead underwriting could harness the power of artificial intelligence (AI) to drive improved results.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The AI exercise focused on sabotage and terrorism business \u2013 chosen for the class\u2019s relative simplicity among the 18 classes of business underwritten by Hiscox London market.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The work focused on <a href=\"https:\/\/www.advantagego.com\/en-us\/content\/advantagego-ingestion-brochure\/\" target=\"_blank\" data-type=\"link\" data-id=\"https:\/\/www.advantagego.com\/en-us\/content\/advantagego-ingestion-brochure\/\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">extracting information sent to the underwriters from brokers<\/a>, typically for a renewal, looking at different schedules and coverages \u2013 what&#8217;s in and what&#8217;s out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cWe thought that gave us the platform to deliver something tangible in a short timeframe, having not done it before,\u201d said Kate Markham, CEO of Hiscox London Market, speaking on the Voice of Insurance podcast.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>While not a live system yet, the pilot\u2019s results were impressive, most obviously in terms of saving time, she emphasised.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cWe were able to take a process that typically takes three or more days, and reduce it to three minutes. So, a lot quicker to get from that initial email submission through to quote,\u201d Markham said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Work begins with the email submission, she explained.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cIt&#8217;s saying what&#8217;s in the email, what information has been provided to me, what attachments are in there, unpacking that, and then being able to look at those schedules of values that come with the terrorism risk, to be able to plot those, manage the aggregations around them, do what we call the blast zone analysis, and then have a look at the contract,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cIt\u2019s taking this client\u2019s set of risks or set of properties, plotting them on a map, and saying \u2018Where are they? And how do they overlay on the clients that we\u2019re already insuring\u2019, and if there was to be a bomb, we look at how much damage we would be insuring within a 250 meter radius,\u201d she added.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The result was faster, better decision-making, she explained, on key questions about whether a risk could be insured, and what a new risk would do to the existing portfolio, and how to price the risk effectively.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cWe have built the pricing engine in the cloud, and that&#8217;s linked in via an API, all automated as well,\u201d Markham said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cThe goal is to be able to do it whilst the broker is on the phone, and we think that&#8217;s achievable,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>What Hiscox trialled in the fourth quarter began with the current reality of an email with attachments, rather than what the London market is already planning through its <a href=\"https:\/\/www.advantagego.com\/en-us\/content\/flexibility-will-be-why-blueprint-two-succeeds\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Blueprint Two digital transformation initiative at Lloyd\u2019s<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Such conversations, with data cleansed from spreadsheets and word documents, can increasingly be banished to the past, she thinks, for those brokers that have regular interactions featuring the same kinds of data and documents, which can be digitised.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cThat&#8217;s the way the market is going,\u201d Markham said. \u201cWhat we need for that to happen, is we need upfront \u2013 the broker piece, the client piece \u2013 to be coming in digitally. That&#8217;s where Blueprint Two comes in, where we talk about call data record, and that&#8217;s about having clean data coming in.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The proof of concept trial is an example of pragmatism, she suggested, as it works with today\u2019s imperfect world, rather than the post transformation outcomes envisaged through Blueprint Two.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cWe\u2019re not asking the broker to change what they do today, whilst we all work together to try and move the market forward in terms of modernisation, but yes, it will be better in the future,\u201d Markham added.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Plans are now underway to make the pilot scheme live across classes of business, she revealed, starting with major property direct and facultative business.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>More broadly, Hiscox has already been using an in-house model to cleanse schedules of values, taking time-consuming work away from underwriters.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cWhen we implemented that a couple of years ago, we found it paid for its own build costs within less than 12 months. Now, that is pure cost saving every single year on an ongoing basis,\u201d Markham said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It\u2019s largely about saved labour, with the time saving allowing underwriters to add more value, Markham noted. \u201cIt&#8217;s about freeing the underwriters up to do the things that they&#8217;re actually trained to do,\u201d she added.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Kate Markham, CEO of Hiscox London Market, featured on the latest episode of the Voice of Insurance podcast. In the final quarter of 2023, Hiscox London Market undertook a proof of concept with Google Cloud, to see how its lead underwriting could harness the power of artificial intelligence (AI) to drive improved results. The AI [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":6594,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ep_exclude_from_search":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[11,38,14],"line-of-business":[30,20,31],"class_list":["post-6617","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-podcasts","tag-ingestion","tag-technical-vision","tag-underwriting-workbench","line-of-business-political-risk","line-of-business-property","line-of-business-terrorism"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.advantagego.com\/en-us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6617","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.advantagego.com\/en-us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.advantagego.com\/en-us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.advantagego.com\/en-us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.advantagego.com\/en-us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6617"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.advantagego.com\/en-us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6617\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.advantagego.com\/en-us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6594"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.advantagego.com\/en-us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6617"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.advantagego.com\/en-us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6617"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.advantagego.com\/en-us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6617"},{"taxonomy":"line-of-business","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.advantagego.com\/en-us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/line-of-business?post=6617"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}