Underwriters are key to the development of insurtech for specialty insurance and reinsurance, according to Jonathan Spry, CEO of Envelop Risk.
Speaking at the 2018 Bermuda Executive Forum, Spry explained that alongside its reinsurance partner MS Amlin, Envelop Risk was “underwriting using a combination of augmented intelligence, combining human expertise and the judgment of our underwriting team with artificial intelligence, particularly machine learning”.
He expanded: “We are using expertise in parallel and in interaction with the artificial intelligence. We do not believe in the ‘computer says no’ or ‘blackbox’ models.”
“We are operating in reinsurance and specialty insurance and I struggle with the idea that that will ever become fully automated.”
Spry commented that in relation to insurtech, “the underwriter is dead, long live the underwriter”.
He added: “What we are seeing is the underwriter is key to the development of insurtech for commercial lines, specialty, and reinsurance. They just need a slightly different toolkit than they have."
According to Spry, the augmented intelligence strategy was proving “particularly helpful for cyber insurance and reinsurance”.
He said: “We have a team of data scientists who are using tools that allow them to analyse huge amounts of data. We can use these models to bring us to conclusions we wouldn’t necessarily arrive at.”
“It is a bit of a myth that there is no data surrounding cyber. There’s a huge quantity of data surrounding the cyber economy, there is just a lack of conveniently labelled claims data but that is a very different thing from having no data.”
“What we are doing is using these techniques to overcome patches in claims data.”
