Move the needle: how technology can drive better risk selection and underwriting

On the back of its first fundraising in November 2022, insurtech Send is targeting growth in the North American market. It believes hard market conditions represent a perfect opportunity for insurers to embrace technologies that can improve their risk selection and decision making—but it is also mindful of not growing too fast.

That is the perspective of Andy Moss, Send’s chief executive officer and co-founder of the UK-based insurtech. He stresses that market conditions always present new challenges and new opportunities. There’s no “one size fits all”, but insurers aiming to grow sustainably need a better choice of risks and better data for decision-making—as well as willingness to change, Moss said.

“There’s plenty of opportunity within the market whatever the conditions might be. With the hard market emerging and putting pressure on rates, we see the opportunity there for insurers to pick better risks, try to find the winners in the swathe of submissions that come into your organisation, and get the technology in place that allows you to make sense of it,” said Moss.

“Poor data correlates with poor underwriting performance,” he said. “So leveraging technologies that help you understand the data in front of you on a submission is going to be very important.”

His comments came as he discussed the barriers to the widespread adoption of technologies in a new space that he believes has been “historically under-invested in” and requires more education as the market evolves.

In November, Send secured £9 million Series A investment from venture capital firm Breega, with participation from Mercia, to accelerate its growth in the UK and US, the markets in which it currently operates, and expand to new geographies.

Send’s core product is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) underwriting workbench designed to streamline operations, automate admin-heavy tasks and free up underwriters to focus on core work. The firm describes its workbench as “a one-stop desktop for underwriters” providing a single place for managing new business, renewals, and endorsements.

The composable platform, built for the commercial and specialty markets, processes more than £3.5 billion in gross written premium annually. The additional funding will be used to strengthen Send’s product development and expand the wider team.

“We see a big opportunity for expansion of the business in North America, specifically the US. We will be hiring team members in the US and looking to establish a presence there,” Moss said of Send’s growth strategy for 2023.

Sustainable growth

Before the Breega deal was announced, Send had been largely self-funded. Moss said the company wanted to find the “right partners” for its first fund raise—and it was important it did not overstretch or grow too quickly.

“We are learning a lot of lessons from companies around us: grow, don’t overstretch yourselves, don’t hire too quickly. We have ambitious targets for growth, but we are making sure it’s sustainable.

“There was a funding environment a year or so ago where companies were spending money, burning through it and looking for the next round. That’s not what we’re doing here,” he said. “We want sustainable growth and elevation. We want to be a leader in pre-bind underwriting technology space with our workbench platform.”

Moss acknowledges that there are a number of competitors with “interesting offerings” in the market. But he is confident that none “has the full breadth and maturity of what we’re offering”.

He added: “There are a number of point solutions and maybe line-of-business-specific solutions that we see. We’re trying to occupy a broader ground, the full lifecycle of business—from being able to process new business, renewals and endorsements—through our platform,” he said.

“We have built a rich data model that allows as much data as is needed to support pricing or pushing information into downstream systems. We will continue building in that vein as we want to set ourselves apart.”

Moss sees its workbench technology as a “change-enabler”, a sentiment echoed by Breega, which believes the platform has the potential to become a global category leader in its space.

“To date, Send has the most reliable and user-friendly solution in the underwriting workbench market. Send is paving the way for a more agile industry, helping insurers, reinsurers and managing general agents to transform traditional practices,” Maxence Drummond, venture capital principal at Breega, said at the time of funding.