Airmic backs new platform to speed up renewals

Airmic is backing a potentially transformative digital platform that enables risk managers to upload and share property exposure data with brokers and insurers to speed up renewals.

Four years in development, Big Ticket is free for risk managers and funded through fees paid by the insurance industry and third party vendors. The platform, backed by payment company MasterCard along with financial and industry investors, could save the industry some $25bn in annual operational costs associated with renewals. It claims to halve the time it takes a company to prepare its renewal submission and eradicate over 90% of errors made in property submissions.

Airmic is supporting Big Ticket, which it hopes will be a “catalyst” for change.

“We support this because we want it to be an industry initiative. We are talking to our colleagues in Rims and we are talking to our colleagues in Parima. It’s got to start somewhere and it has to have a catalyst. This is of no financial benefit for Airmic in any shape or form. Its just about getting the industry to come together to do something that shows a lot of opportunity,” said Julia Graham, Airmic’s chief executive and chair of Big Ticket’s advisory board.

Big Ticket is the solution that the risk management community has been “crying out for”, according to Graham.

“Every year at the start of every insurance renewal, hundreds of thousands of companies use an industry-imposed process to collect exposure data. They are asked to use unencrypted spreadsheets and email to do this; a painful, laborious and insecure process that takes up to nine months to complete, at an annual recurring direct operational cost globally of $25bn, on top of which it actually increases vulnerability to data privacy and cyber security risks,” she said.

Big Ticket is currently supported by Aon, Aviva, Oasis and Zurich. Aviva is already using the platform in the UK while more than 20 other European and North American insurers and brokers will soon follow.

According to co-founder and president of Big Ticket Ken Fraser, the platform is in “active dialogue” with ten of the 15 largest brokers, and a similar number of global and regional insurers in the US and Europe. In terms of premium, Big Ticket is in discussions with more than half of North American and UK commercial property markets.

Robert Bartlett, co-founder and chief executive of Big Ticket, said the platform is essentially “digital plumbing” for the insurance industry. It will provide the neutral digital infrastructure required for risk managers, captive insurers, brokers, insurers, claims management companies and third party vendors to share exposure data.

The platform is up and running. It has been used to renew the property programme of UK retailer Specsavers, involving its captive, two brokers and seven insurers. Thirty plus corporate buyers are now using the platform.

Big Ticket will initially focus on commercial property renewals for large corporates and mid-sized companies in the US and UK. It has plans to expand into Asia, as well as other lines of business such as cyber and workers compensation. Longer term, the platform will also look to facilitate premium payments throughout the insurance supply chain.

The current renewal process is “broken” and does not serve the interests of buyers or insurers, according to Bartlett. A single placement has to go to over 50 to 100 different systems, and can take a risk manager up to nine months to prepare for a renewal, he said.

The current method of exchanging insureds data using email and spreadsheets is a “ticking timebomb” in terms of client confidentiality and cyber security, he continued. “The act of buying insurance today increases your vulnerability to cyber bad actors, an acute pain point. And the industry has to wake up to that. The only way the industry can address this at scale is through a vehicle like us,” said Bartlett.

“We are providing a service to the industry, in a way it currently can’t do on its own… Digital infrastructure just will not work on a peer-to-peer basis, which is why MasterCard exists in the payment world. You plug into Big Ticket as a client and you can get to any broker,” he said.

The current model of using peer-to-peer APIs and portals for multinational insurance programme business is outdated, said Fraser. “Buyers do not want to get tied into any private system. In reality, portals kill completion and kill freedom of choice. The starting point for us is that we need freedom of choice and we have to enable, not stifle, competition,” he said.

Bartlett said the insurance industry has never asked buyers what they want in terms of digital connectivity. Big Ticket has been developed to put clients first and address common pain points for renewals, added Fraser.

Bartlett and Fraser are confident Big Ticket can get insurer buy-in, despite traditional commercial rivalries and the increasing value placed on data and insights within the industry. The platform can even help overcome existing legacy back-office issues for large insurers that struggle to transfer insureds data internally between business units, they argue.

“We have a pipeline of over 30 to 35 insurance organisations, all the names you would expect we would speak to, and we have yet to have one insurer or broker walk away from the conversation. They all see value in what we are doing, and those joining in the first wave have agreed and committed to the idea of industry neutrality,” Fraser said.

Bartlett said that Big Ticket can digitise commercial property insurance placements “at scale” and quickly. It takes an insured’s prior year spreadsheet submission, turns it digital and uploads the data to the platform, all paid for by the insurance industry and third party vendors. That data, which remains owned and controlled by the insured, is then made available to brokers and insurers digitally and securely via the platform.

Depending on the permissions granted by the insured, that data – or select parts of the data – can also be shared with other parties, such as reinsurers or modelling firms, explained Bartlett. An insurer or broker can also use the platform to selectively share data and insights with risk managers, for example on climate modelling or social inflation, he said.

“We can lift an entire insurers portfolio onto the platform in less than 12 months. When you think about the market share of the big players we are engaged with, it’s a very short runway to all the exposure data for the UK property industry being on to this platform,” Bartlett said.

Digitising the renewal process could “unlock” innovation in the industry, according to Bartlett. “We allow an entire [insurance] supply chain to lift the firewall and look at their data end to end and generate new solutions. The platform is designed for that. For example, it allows algorithmic underwriting to be developed, which is fundamentally reliant on structured data,” he said.