Convex streamlines workflows and enhances data-driven decision making with hx Renew

Background

Convex is an international specialty insurer and reinsurer, founded by Stephen Catlin and Paul Brand in 2019 to underwrite complex specialty risks across a diverse range of business lines, including Aviation, Marine, Property and Liability.

As a brand-new insurer, Convex’s ambition is to bring something unique to the specialty insurance market. Free from legacy systems and with a clean balance sheet, it had the opportunity to build a best practice business from scratch, utilising new and innovative technologies to maximise efficiencies and reduce costs.

Convex selected hyperexponential’s pricing decision intelligence platform, hx Renew, to develop their suite of pricing tools while achieving speed to market and optimising the underwriting workflow to ensure it was streamlined and data-driven.

Challenge

Traditionally across the market, brokers typically send an extensive schedule of information to the underwriters, who need to manually input all the data into a pricing tool and other internal systems. When the data entry is complete, the underwriter reviews the information, followed by lengthy peer reviews and referral processes handled by email, before a quote is sent to the broker. 

In line with their vision to break new ground in insurance, Sarah Brooks, Convex Portfolio Optimisation Manager and Mike Hansen, Convex Head of Aerospace, knew that even with a great tech stack you still need to streamline the underwriter workflow. Recognising the power of hx Renew, they set out to explore the possibilities.

Solution

With hx Renew, Convex developed robust policy and model workflows, and enabled their teams to make changes or create new models in just two hours. But they didn’t stop there. The Convex Aviation and Portfolio Optimisation teams have leveraged the power and flexibility of hx Renew to achieve their vision to streamline the underwriter workflow, reducing the time from broker proposals to binding a policy from days to hours, and eliminating rekeying through automation.

They have developed ground-breaking dashboards putting intelligence at the fingertips of their underwriters, automatically delivering detailed portfolio management information through the hx Renew platform, and empowering data-driven decision-making like never before.

With hx Renew, the aviation underwriters eliminated rekeying of data by working with brokers to share data in an agreed template which is integrated automatically into the platform. The underwriter is alerted to a new risk in the system via Slack, with a link to dive into the policy directly and assess the risk without the need for any further data entry. 

Email chains are eliminated, and the referral and peer review process is automatically tracked and auditable within hx Renew, allowing for effortless collaboration between underwriters. At the click of a button, a peer review or referral can be triggered, sending an instant message to an underwriter or the Chief Underwriting Officer. The reviewer can quickly access the policy through a link and update the system, with a final message automatically sent back to the underwriter showing the process is complete.   

Once the policy is finalised, it is added as part of the live portfolio data, easily trackable and visible to anyone in the business on a dashboard, accessible on a phone, tablet or laptop. The dashboard shows detailed reporting on rate changes, limit profiles, and more, and is automatically updated hourly. 

Besides time savings through streamlining, this process has also improved the collaboration between underwriters and actuaries on the aviation business line, helping drive profitability through data-driven underwriting. Early results have been impressive, resulting in other business lines at Convex implementing a similar process at various stages. 

What's next?

Convex are already looking ahead for more ways to further enhance the underwriting and pricing process. Integrations between internal systems will deliver more benefits through automation, which hx Renew enables through its flexible APIs. As more lines of business adopt this streamlined underwriting approach, this will continue to drive Convex’s position as a market leader across specialty insurance.  

Being our longest tenured customer, the Convex team is a highly valued partner to hyperexponential. hyperexponential is by the market, for the market, and our customer's feedback helps to shape the future of our product. 

We are inspired by their innovation and can’t wait to see what they achieve next with the platform.