“We chose to work with Insly because of their willingness to adjust the platform to our specific requirements that are essential for us in everyday business.” – Kelly Sims, Operations Development Manager at Signature Underwriting
Signature Underwriting as a company
Signature Underwriting is an MGA, providing insurance for commercial vehicles, primarily for taxis and couriers through an online fleet insurance trading platform. They have access to both Lloyd’s and non-Lloyd’s capacity.
Signature’s unique approach focuses on risk-based underwriting, providing significant discounts for customers who use telematics and vehicle camera technology. These technologies allow for better, more detailed risk evaluation and offer huge benefits to customers seeking online fleet insurance, insurers, and the insurance industry as a whole.
Defining the problem
Signature Underwriting’s business model is based on distribution through brokers. The product itself is not very complex, but when you consider that the administrative side needs to cover telematics, cameras, MTA’s, cancellations, renewals, multi-vehicle quoting, and fleet object management, it all adds complexity to the trading platform. Plus, the system needs to be easily accessible from the web for both brokers and underwriters to provide seamless online fleet insurance.
Solution: Advanced Online Fleet Insurance Trading Platform
The system setup was a difficult and time-consuming task. During the setup, the scope was amended to reflect a minimum viable product (MVP) concept, resulting in a quicker launch. Non-critical functionality was added later. There was a delay in handing over the project, because building multiple object logic is a laborious process. Hence, Signature and Insly agreed to do a soft launch earlier. Trading started in limited capacity and developments were finalised during the soft launch period.
A white-labelled cloud-based system was rolled out to enable Signature Underwriting and its main partner brokers to efficiently provide online fleet insurance. Through this platform, Signature offers different insurance products:
- single vehicle product for taxis;
- online fleet insurance product for couriers;
- courier exclusive product as an extension of the fleet product.
To streamline policy issuing for online fleet insurance, an API integration was added to the fleet product to enable third-party brokers to get quotes from Signature.
Lessons Learned
Looking back at the project, the main learning objective is that more communication between Insly developers and Signature Underwriting would have sped project delivery.
Clear communication is extremely important when building complex products such as this online fleet insurance platform. Signature Underwriting has always been very aware of its needs and in communicating these, which has paved the way for a great customer relationship.
Next Steps
As Signature Underwriting is using Insly full-cycle functionalities from policy administration and claims to accounting, the goal is to upgrade them to the new Insly platform. What could simplify their processes even more, is implementing a business intelligence and reporting tool such as Metabase, Power BI, or QuickSight that enables insurers and MGAs to create advanced custom business intelligence reports and dashboards from any kind of information they collect.
If you are building complex products such as this online fleet insurance platform or want to embrace technology and data to offer better services for your customers, get in touch. Let’s talk and see how your Insurer or MGA business can benefit from insurance software.
