Broker Insights’ ‘Decision Intelligence’ Officially Heads to the US

After building its business up in the United Kingdom, Broker Insights said it is ready to officially bring its commercial insurance placement analytics to the United States.

For the last 12-18 months, Broker Insights has been preparing for its expansion by making sure it resonates with U.S. brokers, and building a team.

“We’ve made sure that we’ve got the product fitting into the U.S. market,” said Fraser Edmond, president a co-founder of Broker Insights, which has developed technology to help brokers and insurance carriers enhance placement strategies. The firm has been in operation in the U.K. for about six years.

“We’re full steam ahead now,” Edmond told Insurance Journal of the U.S. launch after spending time acquiring customer feedback. He said initial U.S. users have provided positive feedback, and have acknowledged the challenge insurtech Broker Insights is trying to solve—even admitting that they have been trying to build the technology themselves.

Business has taken off in the U.K., according to Brokers Insights, which said it informs brokers and insurers representing over one third of U.K.’s commercial gross premiums. It said it has analyzed 2.5 million commercial insurance policies and has helped brokers place 24% more business with carrier partners by looking at a broker’s book and identifying opportunities to optimize broker-client placement with informed recommendations – including carrier risk appetites and commission information – that brokers can use in risk placement decisions.

Broker Insights’ Vision platform is available in every state and what Edmond described as “decision intelligence” has already collected nearly $1 billion in gross written premium of broker data.

For a brokerage to grow revenues, they would typically think about acquiring more customers, Edmond explained. However, retention rates are high so there is not a load of new business to acquire. Brokers can “get smarter” by looking at business differently, he added.

“There are loads of latent value in a broker’s business,” Edmond said. “If they start to interrogate that—it’s something the large broker entities have done for years. They have armies of people that look at placement management, and at creating programs and facilities. That’s more challenging for others, and we’ve built technology that allows the whole market to do that.”

Even the larger brokers can have a tough time when acquiring lots of business. “The end up in a messy state in terms of systems and data sets, and to pull that into one standardized language they can do something with is really, really challenging,” Edmond said.

We’ve built deep skills in ingesting data from any system and harmonizing that data, cleaning it up, to bring into one standard. Once you get into one standard, that’s when you can do cool stuff with the data. When you put that together with the carrier risk appetite—that’s when the magic happens. We can start to look at optimal earnings you can achieve by placing customers in different directions.”

Broker Insights named Travis Shank president of U.S. operations to lead its U.S. expansion. The company said he has more than 15 years experience in industries such as insurtech, IT services, healthcare, and consulting. Shank said many family members, including his parents and brother, own brokerages.

Shank told IJ that there exists a gap in matching what the carrier wants to write and what the broker needs to sell to serve customers.

“It’s complicated to get that right, and to do it quickly – and do it at scale – because carrier appetites are always changing,” Shank said. “It could be seasonally dependent; it could be strategically dependent. So brokers are always adapting.”

The tension between what a brokers needs to sell and what a carrier can write – coupled with variables such as the added weight of private-equity growth mandates, or broker inorganic growth via acquisition – is addressed by Broker Insights with greater visibility and simplicity, Shank said.

“The broker can see material uplift in the overall top line just by taking a better look at their existing book, and the carrier can get risk placed within its strategy – what it currently wants to underwrite,” Shank said. “They appreciate the brokers bringing the business they want to see.”