Underwrite Me with James Tait | E261

Bringing insurance underwriting into the future.

On today's episode of the Fintech impact, Jason is going to talk to James Tait, CEO of Underwrite Me. It is a platform that allows insurance advisors to quote and handle the entire application that underwriting cycle through one unified platform and does so in 11 countries around the world. James explains how the platform allows each insurer to configure their rules and consistently with their philosophy without asking different questions or without having to agree to exactly the same philosophy. 

Episode Highlights

  • 1.11: Underwrite Me business was set up essentially to make life insurance more accessible, so making it easier to buy, easier to sell. It was launched basically to create this marketplace where financial advisors and customers could go right from the start of the process to through the common application form to put a policy on risk with and insurer without ever leaving Underwrite Me's website.

  • 0.23: James started the Underwrite Me process in UK. It was at a time when advisors would get a quick quote from range of insurance companies across the market and that quick quote will be based on the customer's age. Based on that quick quote, they would have to go to an individual insurer's website, fill out a long-complicated application form.

  • 2.53: Then the doctor's report or some lab tests needed to be done if the decision couldn't be made online with that advisor wanted to get the best terms for their customer and ensure that they were getting the best terms from the customer. They had to spend a lot of time talking to multiple insurers to get a feel for what the underwriting philosophy for their client, says James. 

  • 03.38: Seeing the time-consuming process of filling long forms, James set out to make that huge amount more efficient, research all the different application forms in the market and come up with a common process that would satisfy each of the individual insurers that were out there so that an advisor would have all the information they needed at their fingertips to be able to advise which insurer was best for their client. 

  • 06.02: At Underwrite Me, someone puts their details in the portal and says these are their general health concerns. First the underwriting of their health condition as an individual happens and then the persona gets recommendations on, pricing on insurance companies.

  • 07.51: As per James it was a painful process over the years to convince everybody to come on board. It wasn't easy by any stretch of the imagination, but the fundamental for them was that they were trying to improve the market. 

  • 08.58: James explains how they partnered with a couple of very large financial advice firms, and distributors in the UK that provided some of the attractive business volumes. 

  • 10.01: As per James there is a lot that they provide to the insurers even outside the marketplace that they are providing to do that. 

  • 11.30: As per James, companies and financial advice companies using underwrite me platform are saving upwards of an hour a day in time spent on the phone to insurers trying to deal with them, underwriting disclosures with their clients and then how much that already could generate in terms of the business volume, it's huge for them.

  • 14.09: As per James what they are trying to gather on the platform is a common set of data that each insurer can use. They are not asking everybody to use exactly the same questions. So, there are 15 or 20 questions that everybody has to answer, but the drill down questions beneath that are aimed at getting the data that insurers need. 

  • 14.50: James explains how the flexibility within the platform made it much easier to get everybody to agree on a common approach.

  • 16.31: Talking about the positive feedback that James has received from advisors, first it is the amount of time it saves them and second the fact that they have everything there at their fingertips, whether that's price comparison, underwriting comparison or product comparison.

  • 19.14: James shares how they are focused on three regions at the moment, UK and Ireland, Asia Pacific and North America.

  • 19.24: They started off in the UK and Ireland with the marketplace detection platform and then started licensing the underwriting technology outside that. So that underwriting technology became the international part of Underwrite Me's business. 

  • 21.59: James talks about automation and how it is a hot topic in the market. How you use AI and help within your processes in an underwriting context. He says that a rules engine is a very established piece of technology that delivers high levels of automation.

  • 23.18: James explains how they are fundamentally trying to make the underwriting process quick and efficient as possible so that they improve access to insurance and that means automating and speeding up every aspect of it, whether it's the simple rules based decision making piece at one end or the very complex medical data you would get from a doctor at the other end, you want to make that process as quick and efficient as possible. 

  • 25.01: Every industry at the moment, whether it's personalized medicine or personalized advertising, personalization is definitely the future of life insurance, says James.

  • 26.10: One change that James would like to make in the industry is ease of access to electronic health data. 

  • 28.00: Technology can solve pretty much anything you wanted to solve, and the challenge has been making sure we focus on the right things and because of our desire to make insurance more accessible, says James.

  • 29.01: Life insurance industry is such a positive one in terms of the focus on the customer. The products really help people in difficult and challenging times and there is such a collective desire to do the right thing by the customer, says James.

3 Key Points

  1. Jason and James talk about the early days of Underwrite Me, and how James convinced or how he got the insurance companies even come to the table on this?

  2. James explains how they are trying to improve both sales and customer experience.

  3. James shares his journey and how 22% of the financially advised UK life insurance is written through the underwrite me platform.

Tweetable Quotes

  • "I know the best thing for my client and it's three different types of policies and I am better off putting in three different insurance carriers, I have to fill up three different sets of applications, coordinate the sharing of information across all those. It's an epic amount of work and the response, every insurance, every insurance wholesaler always gives us, well, you just put it all through us. It's just like, no, I am not doing that." - Jason 

  • "By launching Underwrite Me, we were putting something in place that I think everybody would agree would make financial advisors lives much, much easier and in a market, that's probably struggled to grow over the years." - James 

  • "Think about how many people probably avoid insurance as advisors because of the amount of work it is, and the uncertainty of all this and no one likes to get a rating, it would be so much easier to know if the rating is going to basically happen while you are just doing the application, like that sort of instantaneous feedback to deal with the client is incredible." - Jason 

  • "Imagine if you had an extra month to make revenue with no additional investment like that is just profound in terms of size." - Jason

  • "Underwriting is a field that is changing really rapidly at the moment and it's really interesting the differences around the world in the focus of that development. So, a big topic at the moment is how we incorporate predictive models, artificial intelligence, machine learning within the underwriting process." - James 

Resources Mentioned

Fintech ImpactJason PereiraFintech