Canopius spins out Vave as MGA, tips it to write $100m premium this year

Specialty re/insurer  Canopius Group has spun out its algorithmic underwriting platform Vave as a standalone managing general agent (MGA).

Vave began trading in May 2019, and has since quoted on over 1.2 million risks, representing $2.2bn of premium. Vave MGA is forecast to exceed $100m premium by the end of the year.

The MGA is led by Marek Shafer, Jamie Martin and Rob Porter.

In addition to its US homeowners’ property and monoline flood portfolio, the company said Vave will also launch a commercial property product later this year. Vave’s algorithmic pricing engine is connected via API to the largest brokers in the US surplus lines wholesale market, enabling them to quote and bind risks on an automated basis in seconds, and access products founded on vast amounts of data.

The platform is controlled by data-driven underwriting algorithms and, drawing on attributes from millions of lines of risk information, the team can validate the model and make improvements continually.

Shafer said: “Vave’s vast potential was evident very early on and as an MGA it can access the capital required to really set it loose in terms of scale and sophistication. It is hyper efficient for brokers and, with greatly reduced frictional costs, highly effective from a capacity perspective. Vave is not a delegated authority play, in fact it is arguably the opposite as it is bringing the underwriting back to London.”

Mike Duffy, chief underwriting officer, Canopius said: “Vave is a fresh approach to insuring high-volume risk, bringing clarity and efficiency to risk portfolio management. Vave was created as this is exactly the kind of innovation Lloyd’s requires from the market. After three years of development and a highly successful year of trading, we believe Vave is the future of Lloyd’s. By reducing costs and improving data accuracy through its digital processes, Vave is already demonstrating some of the market’s key ambitions outlined in Blueprint Two.”

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