Two executives of a British company aiming to address the data-management and sharing inefficiencies that have long plagued the insurance industry are in Bermuda this week for talks with local companies.

VIPR Solutions focuses on two particular areas of the market: delegated authority underwriting — which involves insurers authorising third parties, often known as managing general agents, to underwrite risks and issue policies on their behalf — and quota share reinsurance.

Paul Templar, VIPR’s chief executive, and Tony Russell, the chief revenue officer, told The Royal Gazette, that the demand for digital solutions to tackle inefficiencies was growing.

A softening market is sharpening companies’ focus on cost controls at a time when executives are looking to harness advanced technology — including artificial intelligence — to streamline processes in ways that benefit their bottom line. Combine that with the explosive growth in MGAs and VIPR sees a huge market opportunity.

“Every prospect or customer that we speak with all say the same thing: that they want to double the amount of business they’re writing under delegated authority,” Mr Templar said.

“It’s a real ambition and clearly only those that can do it really efficiently will be able to achieve it and that's really where our platform comes into play.”

Last week VIPR announced a partnership with WCL, launching what the companies described as the market’s “first complete end-to-end digital workflow for non-bureau delegated underwriting”, promising to eliminate the longstanding manual handoff between broker submission and downstream bordereaux processing.

Data, transmitted along the industry’s value chain by means of documents known as bordereaux that include details of risks and policies, can become messy or fragmented, because different companies use different systems and formats. Cleansing this data as it passes between brokers, insurers, MGAs and reinsurers is a painstaking and time-consuming task.

VIPR’s AI-enabled platform cleanses and standardises the data, producing time and efficiency gains for around 60 customers across the world, including giants such as Munich Re, and an approximately 50 per cent market share in the Lloyd’s MGA market.

Mr Russell said: “For some of the reinsurers here in Bermuda, by the time they get a bordereau that's been through three or four people's systems, it's been fragmented, it loses value, and they get very skinny information.

“So, what we do is go right back to the source to pick up that effectively bound risk and bring it all the way down the supply chain, because there's a value in that.”

As companies grow, the approach to coping with the extra administrative challenges of higher bordereaux volume has traditionally been to increase staffing rather than implement a more efficient system, Mr Russell said.

“From what we’re seeing in Bermuda, there is a pivot point as to whether you automate or keep throwing arms and legs at it,” Mr Russell added. “Given the high employee costs in Bermuda, I'm not sure arms and legs is an option here. The argument is that if you want to grow, you have to have a system that allows you to scale up.”

That argument is gaining traction, the two executives said. Over the past two years in particular, they have witnessed a sea change in appetite from prospects, with meetings now frequently including C-suite decision-makers.

While VIPR uses AI, it does so carefully, Mr Templar said. “AI, on its own, will do a great job. It'll give you the right answer a lot of the time, but sometimes it hallucinates,” he said.

While AI can help greatly with the heavy lifting of repetitive tasks, when it comes to critical business processes such as data mapping, “the key thing is making sure the outcomes are the always the same, and they’re auditable, so you can prove how you got to the result”, he added.

Mr Templar is the cofounder of VIPR and put together the first version of the platform in 2010.

“Today we see hundreds of thousands of files and billions of dollars worth of premium being processed through the platform,” Mr Templar said. “That’s across MGAs, brokers, carriers, lawyers, managing agents, reinsurers, the whole gamut.

“Now we are seeing a network effect, where we have customers that are an MGA, dealing with a customer that’s a broker, dealing with a customer that's a managing agent that also deals with a customer of ours that’s a reinsurer, and suddenly, rather than talking about passing bordereaux, we're talking about processing data from customer to customer. It’s starting to gel together because of the scale we have.”