Rising Edge
Helping Rising Edge launch to market with speed, intelligence and confidence
Key results
Enabling savings of over 30% on valuable underwriter time typically spent rekeying data
Allowing real-time risk-adjusted rate change, in-tool audit and compliance capabilities, and simple and secure API connections to the policy admin system
Enabling model development, refinement, and business launch within 6 months, compared to 12-18 months for insurers building from scratch
Background
Rising Edge is a boutique, client-focused underwriting agency and MGA with expertise in Directors' and Officers' liability insurance and risk management.
Rising Edge CEO, Philippe Gouraud, wanted a pricing platform with the flexibility, agility, and scalability to promptly deliver innovative solutions to customers and allow the company's underwriters and actuaries to build better models and access higher-quality data. After reviewing some options in the market, the company considered building this platform from scratch until hx Renew was recommended by David Hughes, founder of Mulberry Risk, a consultancy providing actuarial, analytical, and capacity management services to MGAs.
Rising Edge chose hx Renew since it's a highly flexible platform that allows easy integrations via APIs and combines effortlessly with other business systems, improving the overall efficiency of the company's underwriting strategy.
“When Phillipe described his ambitions for Rising Edge, he mentioned wanting it to be a market-leading MGA. I recommended hx because I could see the adoption by major insurers like Convex, positioning hx as the leading pricing platform. An MGA also having the same platform and enjoying the agility and capacity it offers really stands out in the market.”
David Hughes, Mulberry Risk Founder
Challenge
Launched in the first half of 2021, Rising Edge is a new business with an opportunity to enter the market with optimised tools and processes to set it apart from competitors and ensure best-in-class broker and client solutions.
Rising Edge wanted to capture as much data as possible to support better analytics for the future and avoid time-consuming processes like underwriter rekeying, which typically costs insurers over 30% of valuable underwriting time.
Solution
The Rising Edge team first designed an optimised end-to-end underwriting, claims and financial management tool from scratch, including a sophisticated and agile pricing model. Rising Edge set up a project management team led by Miles Murphy, its Finance Director and Chief Operating Officer, and selected Lucid UX, a software and data solutions company, and Mulberry Risk to build its proprietary platform. The Mulberry team is responsible for developing Rising Edge's models, leveraging hx Renew and collaborating with the hyperexponential and Rising Edge teams.
With hx Renew, the Mulberry team has successfully developed four models with several sub-models for Rising Edge. The model build and refining process was made easy by hx Renew, enabling real-time changes to models based on underwriter feedback. With seamless integration with internal tools, processes that take hours per risk for traditional underwriting firms can be performed in seconds by Rising Edge - allowing its underwriters to focus on its clients and brokers, write more profitable business, drive growth and free up time for learning and development.
Rising Edge also enjoys real-time risk-adjusted rate change, in-tool audit and compliance capabilities to help ensure adherence to guidelines and regulations, and simple and secure API connections to the policy admin system, eliminating data re-keying and automating renewals. Renew provides highly structured data to enable automated and consistent reporting on aggregations and accumulations which is essential to securing and retaining capacity, and making data driven decisions to steer the business, ensuring alignment to plan and driving profitability.
"Phillipe has ambitious plans for Rising Edge over the next five years, and we believe hx Renew is well-positioned to help us achieve them. Python, the programming language Renew uses, enables artificial intelligence, data cleansing, and more. As hx evolves, we'll be able to leverage AI to improve our models to something futuristic and deliver all our ambitious goals."
David Hughes, Mulberry Risk Founder
Results
Rising Edge successfully wrote its first policy in May 2021, only six months after development started in November 2020. hx Renew was instrumental in helping Rising Edge launch into the market, enabling the first pricing model to be built, refined, and finalised within the first three months. This process would typically take insurers between 12 to 18 months when building systems from scratch — a 4x acceleration in model build time compared to the industry standard, resulting in immediate, tangible ROI for Rising Edge. With hx Renew in place, Rising Edge could launch to the market faster with the necessary structure to meet customer demands and stay competitive.
"We believe that with the team of software and data solution providers we have assembled, including hx Renew, we have the foundational requisites to grow by developing new products, bringing new capacity, and accessing new distribution channels. And the speed to execute this has been much faster, at a lower cost than if we built something from scratch in-house, more bespoke, scalable and more suitable than procuring a “ready to use” software package."
Philippe Gouraud, Rising Edge CEO
In today's world, being able to react quickly to the rapidly changing market is a business imperative for MGAs. hx Renew empowers MGAs with the speed, intelligence and confidence to better enable their underwriting teams – and the benefits don't stop there.