Guillaume Bonnissent’s Insurance Technology Diary: Make it bendy

I read with amusement this week that Symphony Risk Solutions, the US brokerage, has appointed a director of cannabis solutions. I chuckled because, in my decades as an underwriter, I learned that brokers tend to live their specialities.

The yacht brokers spend time on boats, contingency brokers watch football matches – the deeper and more niche the speciality, the more thoroughly immersed is the broker in the practical, day-to-day experience of their clients.

Just to be clear, I’m not suggesting that Corey Tobin, new head of Symphony Grow, is a stoner. Nor that he’s an agriculturalist. When I was a K&R underwriter, none of the brokers I dealt with were kidnappers, extortionists, or pirates (at least, not as far as I know).

But the news reminded me, again, of the enormous variability of data we must have at our fingertips to do our jobs well. It’s one of the reasons that getting insurance technology correct has always proved difficult for London.

The specific data you need to collect, parse, understand, evaluate and store is very different for an aviation risk than it is for a D&O submission. The possible interconnections between the types of data which could, for example, lead to aggregation of risk are also very different.

This creates a number of challenges for insurance technology providers and their users (although as providers, it is incumbent upon us to remove all user challenges). We must develop and deliver systems which are sufficiently flexible to eliminate the need to push square pegs into round holes.

If the user wants to define a residential property according to its number of bedrooms, rather than its area in square metres, we must be able to accommodate both. If the bedrooms are hotel rooms, we’ll need to be able to add a different set of metrics. If they’re cabins on a cruise ship, and therefore they move about the surface of the Earth at will, we will need a different way to think about the same data once again.

This is one of the many reasons that insurance technology is hard. It makes it enormously difficult to translate a solution that works for one group of underwriters or brokers directly across to another.

At the same time, it’s of course pointless to reinvent the wheel for every imaginable new type of risk. We must recycle and be creative.

I once saw a very early Lloyd’s aviation policy, down in the vaults on Lime Street. In fact, it was just a motor policy with the word ‘driver’ crossed out and ‘aeronaut’ written in its place. The blank space on the paper was big enough to accommodate. More than a century later, it’s the same kind of flexibility we need to build into our systems.

Guillaume Bonnissent is CEO of Quotech