Insurance United Kingdom

Revenue increase from £1M to £5M for one of the products, accelerated go-to-market goals, and improved insurance trading efficiency

Executive summary

Challenge: Our client is dedicated to delivering the best tailored insurance solutions with cutting-edge digital tools. One of their APIs caused inefficient real-time valuations taking up to 10 seconds, which was far too long for online insurance aggregators.

Approach: We worked with the inhouse team to build a flexible, cloud-based API on Azure, conducted complex data migration, and introduced real-time reporting on Snowflake. We also helped create APIs for other products and implemented zero-downtime deployments, faster quotation engines, and external policy imports.

Result: The client accelerated the go-to-market of key initiatives, increasing revenue from 1M GBP to 5M GBP on an API product and maintaining a Combined Ratio below 90%. As a market leader, Hiscox uses real-time modelling and pricing to make better underwriting decisions.

Table of contents

About the client

Hiscox is a global specialist insurer, headquartered in Bermuda and listed on the London Stock Exchange (LSE:HSX). Their ambition is to be a respected specialist insurer with a diverse portfolio by product and geography. They believe that building balance between catastrophe-exposed business and less volatile local specialty business gives the opportunities for profitable growth throughout the insurance cycle.

The Hiscox Group employs over 3,000 people in 14 countries, and has customers worldwide. Through the retail businesses in the USA, UK, Europe and Asia, they offer a range of specialist insurance products in commercial and personal lines. Internationally-traded, bigger-ticket business and reinsurance is underwritten through Hiscox London Market and Hiscox Re & ILS.

Making a price change and seeing the impact on the book used to take months, but now it can take minutes and a few hours later we can see, by county or state in the US, how that might have changed demand for the product.

Tom King
Flood Line Underwriter

Improving the client’s value proposition and competitiveness

Our collaboration has significantly improved the efficiency and systems integration capability of Hiscox’s insurance trading processes, making them stand out from the competition.

Our client has reached previously set goals of accelerating the go-to-market of key initiatives and collecting the assumed revenue early. Revenue connected to one of the developed API products rose from 1 M GBP to 5 M GBP, while retaining a strong division’s Combined Ratio below 90%.

Hiscox can use real-time modelling and pricing to make better underwriting decisions. All APIs with Future Processing involvement are now used by numerous insurance brokers in the USA and soon by one of the largest brokers in Lloyds of London.

Future Processing partnered in the develop of a new, flexible, cloud-hosted API on Azure, along with complex data migration solutions, and real-time reporting on Snowflake for the FloodPlus product. Around 10% of the US commercial flood policy market is handled by the FloodPlus API, and it generates 40-50k quotes every week while processing approximately $120 million yearly.

We also supported the creation of new APIs for other insurance products (e.g., BindPlus, Cargo) and helped implement enhancements like zero-downtime deployments, speeding up the quotation engine or how to import policies that exist outside the system.

The team migrated 58,000 policies worth a total of $65 million and on top of that 43,000 active quotes. The entire migration took place in about eight months. Over 20 companies use our API, with new still in the queue.

Our client is considered a market leader in flood policies thanks to, among other things, transaction and current risk exposure reports updated in real time and the ability to easily and quickly make changes to pricing models.

Before, Hiscox had an older, API for their FloodPlus product, making it difficult to maintain and inefficient for real-time use. For online insurance aggregators, quick valuation is essential, as slow responses may prevent the valuation from appearing in the results. In this case, determining property coordinates, collecting risk data from various external providers, and generating the valuation took as much as 10 seconds, which was too long.

Going digital with FloodPlus has allowed us to deploy aggregate to flood risk in a more sophisticated way. It means we can use real time modelling and pricing to make better underwriting decisions. We can then manage our aggregate and provide more accurate pricing, to deliver a better long-term product for customers.

Tom King
Flood Line Underwriter

Main benefits of our collaboration

  • Revenue connected to one of the developed API products rose from 1 M GBP to 5 M GBP, while retaining a strong division’s Combined Ratio below 90%,
  • Our client accelerated the go-to-market of key initiatives and collected the assumed revenue early,
  • The client is a market leader in flood policies thanks to, among other things, transaction and current risk exposure reports updates in real time and the ability to easily and quickly make changes to pricing models,
  • Hiscox can make better underwriting decisions based on real-time modelling and pricing, improving their overall insurance trading efficiency,
  • One of the APIs generates 40-50k quotes every week while processing approximately $120 million yearly, driving further company growth,
  • We have migrated 58,000 policies worth a total of $65 million and on top of that 43,000 active quotes in about eight months.

Technologies used in the projects