How re/insurers can meet their data challenges

It takes a lot to move from a comfortable and safe position in an established, secure firm to working for a startup. Usually, the career shift is in the opposite direction: a few years employed by a new firm and, once that time has come to an end, a move to a more-established workplace.

Not for Aydin Betez, chief product officer at Supercede, who joined the Re/insurance Lounge, our on-demand platform for interviews and panel discussions with industry leaders, to talk about his own career move. When he spoke in September to Intelligent Insurer, he had been in the role for only a few weeks.

“Willis Re was a great company and I enjoyed my time there,” said the reinsurer’s former chief technical officer, “but the opportunity to help this sector more widely across the value chain was, for me, the underlying reason for wanting to join Supercede.”

Betez came into the insurance industry from a technological background. “I started my career in 2003,” he said, “after studying for a computer science degree.” Following a stint at the Big Picture UK, he bounced between financial services companies before joining Willis Re in 2018.

He left in August 2021 after three-and-a-half years, and joined Supercede the same month, where he is responsible for leading the company’s cloud-based digital ecosystem, built for the global reinsurance market.

“Of all the sectors I’ve worked in,” said Betez, “reinsurance and insurance have been my favourites. I even did my CI exams as a technologist because I enjoyed it so much. I think the sector is transforming itself. It’s exciting for anyone joining right now. And I also get to see what the future will look like.”

Supercede’s product is a platform that seeks to collect and collate information and data for reinsurers and insurers. The aim is to move the industry on from the manual entry of facts and figures—often scattered across different forms and media—to a place where, once data is entered, it does not need to be re-entered or cleansed at each step of the process.

Originally known as Riskbook, the company became Supercede earlier this year. It founders say that this was because the data-cleansing part of the business became more prominent as the company began to mature.

“We are in the game to help all parties along the value chain,” said Betez. “That includes cedants, brokers, and reinsurers, assisting them to digitise the whole process. At the moment, a lot of the processes used internally are somewhat manual and online. Supercede’s goal is to digitise the process, from beginning to end.”

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New challenges

Jerad Leigh, co-founder and chief executive officer of Supercede, joined the call at this point to speak about the company’s product.

“We’ve identified a real need for cedants and brokers, to help improve how they prepare the submission data that needs to go into the market for a reinsurance transaction. What we’ve been seeing is that the only tool everyone uses seems to be Excel,” he explained.

“Eventually, you’re working with millions of rows that are pushing Excel to its limit. That’s a huge friction point. What happens is that the preparation of this data can often take several months. We’ve built technology aimed at improving that.”

Data, said Betez, is key, especially in an industry that values information and works across multiple jurisdictions and states. For too long, re/insurers have been hampered by how they deal with data. And that is where Supercede comes in.

“One of the challenges is the continual cleansing of data throughout the whole value chain,” said Betez.

“The point of the analytics is that, if we can get that data into a good shape from the very beginning, it becomes a much more seamless experience for all parties.”

Leigh added that the main selling point for Supercede is being able to demonstrate its abilities with data already for reinsurers.

“The real excitement for reinsurers is that we work with multiple brokers. And, as we continue to scale our broker community, the reinsurers can see submissions from many sources, all in the same place and in a consistent format,” he said.

For Betez, the main advantage that Supercede brings to the market is its ability to bolster reinsurers dealing with data.

“Supercede tries to create confidence in that data. Whether you’re the cedant, the broker, or the reinsurer, that has efficiencies for everyone, not just reinsurers,” he concluded.

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