The founder and chief executive of a company providing a more efficient workflow for the review of insurance and reinsurance contracts, returns to the island next month for client meetings after quickly driving the start-up to profitability.

Matti Parnanen said Ultrassure, which is empowered by artificial intelligence, is growing rapidly after just a short period of time because it addresses key pain points in the reinsurance industry.

It helps that he has a working knowledge of those pain points from his years in the industry himself.

He said Ultrassure helps insurance and reinsurance organisations structure and search contractual information while maintaining links back to the underlying source documents. The platform is designed to help teams work more efficiently with complex contract documentation, while aiding human review and judgment.

He recalled that when he was in the industry, he would have to determine the extent of exposure for a reinsurance company.

He said: “At one point it seemed every six months to 12 months, there was a new thing that [meant] we had to go and study our entire portfolio. And when we would do that exercise, we would have to go to our cloud folder of sorts, download every single document and amending document.”

He said it could take weeks to get all the relevant information together, sometimes when they were busy, because there were other pressures in play.

“I just thought there had to be a better way to actually understand contract-wise what was in your portfolio,” he said.

“I'd like the underwriters and the people that are sort of the wise ones of the company to be empowered with this information because I think they can make at least little marginal changes and improvements on their contracts at every single renewal period. And in the long run and in the fullness of time, I think they could create a better portfolio.”

He said there were about a dozen companies that had signed up to the service in the short time he has been presenting it.

Mr Parnanen said: “We’re already serving fronting carriers, MGAs [managing general agents], excess property and casualty players.

“It's a modular system, so it works out of the box for all of them. There's just a small sort of calibration window where we work together to figure out what we want the outputs to be for some of the AI tooling built within, custom-built for your company.

“The onboarding is very easy and the applicability across the insurance space is very easy, as well.

“I think of us a little bit as an outsourced ‘dev’ team where we have this very modular, out-of-the-box platform that works well. But we’re sort of also taking the feedback in on a Monday, and then Friday shipping features that they had asked for and not charging any more for it.

“A lot of the incumbents and old school, the old guard — when you ask them for a new feature, they scope it out, they say six months, and they say it's going to cost you.”

But he said he would rather be happy that future customers might benefit from additional features.