Transforming insurance solutions through Global Partnerships

These collaborations, spanning across diverse scales and scopes, are instrumental in enhancing the offerings we present to our global customers.

Tony Russell, VIPRs Chief Revenue Officer explains, “Our work primarily involves operating within the delegated underwriting market. This practice allows insurers to authorise third parties, such as cover holders or managing general agents, to underwrite business on their behalf. In this scenario, there is a considerable volume of data to deal with, and managing such vast quantities can present significant challenges.

“However, we view these challenges as opportunities. We help our customers capitalise on their data, streamlining its collection, management, and analysis to offer invaluable insights that enable insurers to make better informed decisions, identify trends, and to gain a competitive edge”, Tony continues.

Our journey in the insurance industry began in the Lloyds market back in 2009. Since then, we have steadily expanded our reach to 5 international markets, including the United States, Canada and mainland Europe.

This growth has not only increased our customer base, but also broadened our understanding of the global dynamics of the industry. This knowledge enables us to foster partnerships that are mutually beneficial and enhance the operational efficiency of our customers.

Fostering innovation and expanding reach

At VIPR, we understand that staying ahead in this industry requires investment, innovation, and AI capabilities as and when required, and we are keen to serve our customers above and beyond their expectations. Our collaborations extend to a variety of organisations providing a broad range of solutions. We carefully select these partners based on several key factors. These include their reputation, market adoption, and the alignment of their product with our overall objectives and strategies to deliver a best-in-class offering.

Since 2023, we have announced a number of collaborations and partnerships in the market. More recently, a Strategic Alliance with AdvantageGo's Underwriting workbench APIs. This will provide a frictionless experience when importing bordereaux data for delegated business by integrating with VIPR's leading bordereau management solution, VIPR Intrali. This will ensure that raw Premium, Risk and Claims data being imported into AdvantageGo’s Underwriting workbench is standardised, cleansed, and validated against the contract terms.

This alliance will offer Underwriters the powerful benefits of AdvantageGo's Underwriting workbench and a comprehensive and integrated view of their portfolio for both their open market risks and delegated authority.

Quickly following that, we announced our Insurity and VIPRs Strategic Partnership, stating our commitment to working closely with program writers to remove unnecessary barriers and drive efficient bordereau processing. Delegated underwriting and operations teams will be able to analyse real-time performance to make informed decisions using secure data methods while ensuring a common and consistent view of risk, premium, and claims data. This partnership helps simplify the distribution chain, something that has long been an ambition of the London market and beyond.  

Our expansion into new territories presents its challenges, including unfamiliar systems and diverse regulatory environments; however, our flexible approach, combined with a readiness to adapt to these situations and systems, has played a significant part in our success, so far. Our      partnership selection also remains consistent across markets. We focus on well-established, widely adopted systems that align with our goals and solutions which offer rapid market impact.

Embracing Future Technologies 

We are always looking to the future, and we see an industry that relies heavily on real-time data exchange. However, most data exchanges between insurance entities still happen via Excel spreadsheets. This practice is not only time-consuming but also prone to human error. Our goal is to partner with companies that facilitate system-to-system data transmission, allowing real-time data exchange. This move will enable faster and more informed underwriting decisions, whilst at the same time boosting overall efficiency.

As a business we recognise the transformative potential of future technologies such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, and large language models. By building in-house models and capabilities, together with integrating these technologies into our platforms via strategic partnerships, we aim to automate the manual, labour-intensive aspects of data processing. This shift will free up human resources to focus on more complex decision-making tasks, again improving efficiency and productivity.

As we continue to explore new markets and technologies, we remain committed to forming relationships that amplify our ability to deliver superior solutions to our customers and the wider market. This relentless pursuit of innovation and efficiency, driven by a robust partnership strategy, positions VIPR at the forefront of an industry looking to embrace a digital future.