Ptarmigan Underwriting Agency is upping its game by having launched an innovative cloud-based trading platform. The system is essentially a standard Insly platform, augmented with Ptarmigan-specific modules and functionalities. It handles underwriting, sales and general administration for Ptarmigan’s cyber insurance product.
Ptarmigan Underwriting Agency is a trading name of Lucas Fettes & Partners Limited, a Lloyd’s broker. Incepted in 2011, Ptarmigan’s focus has been on two specialist lines of business – cyber insurance and insurance for financial institutions. Such specialization enables them to provide the best possible covers in these two distinct areas. Ptarmigan’s capacity providers include selected Lloyd’s syndicates and the International Insurance Company of Hannover SE.
“Implement or switching IT systems is always a long process and a decision should not to be taken lightly, as it is costly and has a direct impact on your business,” comments Kevin Kettrick, the Cyber Underwriter at Ptarmigan. “We chose to work with Insly because we wanted to a have a cloud solution that is tailored to our specific business processes and functional requirements.”
The solution
Ptarmigan distributes its cyber product across several countries, through partnering brokers. This adds a layer of additional complexity since different countries require different documentation, endorsements, and taxes.
To adjust the Insly core platform to accommodate Ptarmigan’s geographical scope, processes and products, a number of specific feature sets were configured and developed in Insly:
- Semi-automatic premium calculator with the possibility for the underwriter to override default rating, and implement tariff changes and discounts
- Premium matrice with comparative, limit-based premiums
- Underwriting and rating rule-set
- Dynamic endorsement database and rule-set
- Support for multiple taxes and tax schemes across regions
- Dynamic document generation, with support for several countries
- Lloyds standard premium bordereau implementation
- Co-insurance based risk splitting between different binders and carriers
Lessons learned
The system setup time went as planned, however, the testing phase time was underestimated as it proved to be more complex than initially assumed. The main focus was to make sure the system correctly produced documents and that the quoting and policy schedule generation worked as intended.
Top 3.5 learning points to consider when making the decision of IT system change / implementation:
- Commit your time. Face to face meetings with the IT company is still the best option.
- Keep up the tempo. The longer the development / implementation project runs, the more costly it ends up for everyone involved.
- Think utopia but build business critical. It does not make sense to automate the 1% of deals that can easily be handled manually.
3.5 Do your testing! Implementation of complex business processes needs careful testing both from the technical and business perspectives.
Next steps
While adding more products to the platform or building a customer portal for clients’ direct access to their information and documents have been discussed, the main scope is currently just to capitalize on the system that is already built and in full swing.
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