A recent roll from Reinsurance News shows that there are a number of barriers that are disrupting innovation within the insurance industry’s pricing technology.
Hundreds of people from across the insurance and reinsurance sector responded to the poll.
Nearly half of the respondents (48%) named dependence on legacy systems, slow adoption of advanced technology, and high costs as the biggest barriers.
However, only 33% named dependence on legacy systems as the biggest barrier, while 15% voted for slow adoption of advanced technology, and just 4% voted for high costs.
Our readers may recall, in January, Ebix Europe, the London-based technology specialist, launched its electronic placing solution – PlacingHub.
Reinsurance News spoke to the company’s Vice President, Pete Smyth shortly after the launch, who explained that PlacingHub addresses the ongoing issues towards the high costs that are associated with other electronic placement platforms across the market.
“We have been reducing costs as much as possible, so we are purely basing ours on a transaction cost model, so we do not have a license cost. This means that people can sign our contracts, but they don’t have to pay a penny if they do not use our system. Our transaction fee, I believe, is the lowest out there, and we are also waiving it for the first year for brokers as well. PlacingHub is well suited in regards to addressing the ongoing costs issues,” Smyth said.
Another key pricing platform that has been featured on our pages is Placing Platform Limited (PPL), which recently confirmed continued strong and stable performance during the peak June and July renewals following remediation and performance initiatives that resulted in enhanced platform performance.
However, PPL clients had experienced a challenging Q4 2023 and initial start to 2024 after transitioning to the new platform, Next Gen, which is the latest version of the London insurance market’s electronic trading platform.
The PPL Next Gen platform went live for the London market in March 2023, following several delays to its roll-out, and was opened to placements for the entire market in early April.
Meanwhile, in May, global insurance and reinsurance brokerage Aon unveiled an update to its Pricing Platform, that the company at the time said will bring enhanced visualisation and automation capabilities to re/insurance underwriters.
As well as this, the software update also added a number of new business lines including U.S. Financial lines and Cyber, as well as geospatial mapping technologies.
