When London Marine wanted to improve the efficiency and scalability of its popular yacht insurance, it had the choice of hiring more people or automating its processes. It opted for the latter and after surveying the market chose Insly, due to the team’s unrivalled insurance knowledge and the system’s flexibility.
With Insly now live, the yacht insurance team has transformed its processes, bringing substantial cost and efficiency savings, and enhancing the customer experience. Quote delivery time has halved from around 30 minutes to less than 15, freeing the team to focus on client relationships and further innovation.
“Insly has given us a tool to enhance an already first-rate service,” says Alex Brown, Director of Growth and Compliance at London Marine. “Clients say turnaround is so much quicker and it gives our underwriters time to have richer conversations with customers.”
Making waves in yacht insurance
Founded by keen mariner, Duncan Thomson in 2001, London Marine is an independent Lloyds broker, which has grown by focusing on niche risks, while prioritising client relationships and the personal touch. Offering the whole spectrum of marine insurance along with select non-marine covers, it has seen particular growth in its yacht insurance; a four-fold increase in the last two years.
But despite its success, until recently the yacht underwriting team was still operating entirely in spreadsheets, limiting the speed at which it could process queries, increasing the chance of human error, and hindering data visibility. Realising this approach was unsustainable, the company faced a decision; employ more people, or automate its processes? Brown explains why it opted for the latter.
“There’s definitely been a move towards a different way of working,” she says “The pandemic drove half of that, but also, it’s the recognition that just employing more people is not the answer. You need to work smarter. That means bringing in new systems.”
Insly leads the fleet.
London Marine approached several providers in its search for the right software but Insly quickly became the frontrunner, due to its understanding of insurance processes and what the company was trying to achieve. The team was also impressed with the flexibility of the Insly system, which gave them the confidence it could handle the complexities of its yacht insurance.
“No yacht is the same, nor navigating in the same waters,” says Zuzana Borges, Yacht Underwriter at London Marine. “We were looking for software which would be flexible enough to cope with our matrix for calculating premiums in different regions, including overloading discounts in particular parts of the world, and could incorporate our guidelines and rules.”
London Marine wanted a system with the capacity to grow with the company, both geographically and as the company scales and evolves.
“When you’re growing… you don’t know exactly where you will end up in the future,” says Brown. “We needed a system with the agility and flexibility to move with us. Zuzana was very confident the Insly system would do that with us.”
A final deciding factor was Insly’s commitment to assign a dedicated Customer Success Manager to the account, to ensure the implementation process would go as smoothly as possible. This turned out to be critical to the success of the roll-out.
All hands on deck for a successful implementation
The relationship manager was in place from the day the contract was signed, working directly with Borges, so both sides had a key point of contact. London Marine believes this provided vital consistency and mutual understanding throughout the project.
“We were working intensively together for the best part of a year, from setting up the platform to the matrix and calculating the logic behind it,” explains Borges. “Before we launched, the relationship manager spent time at our office going through the process, making any required adjustments before we launched into a live environment.”
To ensure the implementation went smoothly, London Marine also involved key stakeholders, such as the finance and claims teams, in the design and development of the system. This enabled them to feed into key decisions and learn how the system works from every angle.
“They’ve got to understand what the system is going to do and how it’s going to work because they need different data,” says Brown. “Getting their buy-in to the system was really important.”
Once the system went live, London Marine built further trust in Insly by having a ‘crossover period’ where it continued to run manual calculations in the background, to double-check the system was working correctly, and address any necessary adjustments.
System live and smooth sailing
Now live, Insly has given London Marine a ‘single source of truth,’ so different teams within the business are working from and updating the same data.
“Underwriting and claims have to work in sync,” says Borges. “I need to know where a claim has happened on the policy and the details of it, ready for renewals. The claims team can now easily refer to the underwriting side where we collect the subjectivities and payments… They can readily see the information on the platform.”
The team has also been impressed with Insly’s flexible reporting, which can be fully customised for different teams and links with finance. Furthermore, the team can pre-programme automatic reports, which can be sent to designated team members, plus insurance or broker partners.
“Our capacity partners are over the moon because any reports they want, we can generate for them,” says Brown. “The fact that it’s all there and we’ve got an almost bespoke system, they’re really happy.”
Overall, team productivity and efficiency have improved dramatically, as everything can be handled in the system, and communication between team members has largely been automated with prompts and actions, ensuring nothing is missed. Plus, the team can now handle quotes remotely, without needing paper files. It has reduced the duplication of tasks, and critically, human error is a thing of the past.
“When dealing with a volume of business, you need to try and eke out those areas of human error as much as you can,” says Brown. “If you have repetitive processes, with an automated system you are reducing the chances of a manual error.”
Productivity picks up speed
Thanks to Insly, London Marine has seen improvements across the board, in time and cost savings, plus service levels. The underwriting team can now respond to all queries within 24 hours and issue quotes in just 10 to 15 minutes, compared to around 30 minutes with their previous system.
This has freed Borges to spend time having richer conversations with clients, as well as work on strategic activities such as developing new products and optimising the Insly system even further, for example, through integrating AI.
Crucially, the company no longer needs to employ more staff to manage its growing book of business, bringing significant salary and training costs.
“If we hadn’t had the system, then we would have had to employ a lot more staff to manage the growth and the systems,” says Brown. “This has definitely given us the edge.”
Full steam ahead.
London Marine is focused on building on the success so far, including adding the claims module plus AI which will enable the system to read application forms automatically. With new products in the pipeline, they also plan to expand Insly to cover other product areas, both on the marine side and beyond.
“Insly will definitely be part of that development process because it’s been so efficient, why wouldn’t we roll it out to other development areas,” says Brown.
Embarking on digitisation? Here’s London Marine’s advice
For any MGAs charting the same course as London Marine, Brown and Borges give the following advice on successful digital transformation:
- Invest time in planning what you want to achieve before talking to providers, to ensure you choose the right partner and system.
- Assign a dedicated team member to the planning and implementation, who understands what is required by the system, has detailed product knowledge, and is clear on objectives.
- Involve relevant team members and wider stakeholders throughout, including finance, underwriting, claims, and beyond. This ensures that their needs are incorporated into the system and they have the full picture before it goes live.
Insly’s modular system allows businesses to select the components that meet their current needs and scale up as those needs grow. Our flexible platform, supported by a team of insurance and technology specialists, ensures a smooth implementation process. Schedule a demo today to discover how we can help you streamline operations and boost efficiency.
