What is your team focused on?

We're working with our very first tier-one insurance client. Our clients are taking upgrades with us all the time and want to evolve their businesses with new features. It takes a lot of effort to implement these innovations and there’s a plethora of other new features that we’re adding and expanding on for all our clients. We recently upgraded our client Ticker onto the latest version of ICE Policy. We launched Ticker to market in early 2019 and since then we have worked together on regular upgrades. Ticker is the prime example of the benefits of consistent upgrades with the latest functionality available, tailored to delivering against new industry demands.

Where is insurance tech headed?

We’ll soon see a lot of niche insurance companies emerge. And companies like us will find new ways to integrate with speciality companies to provide an even richer ecosystem for our clients.

There have been huge advances in AI and machine learning and businesses are already embedding these tools into their core platforms. That is where we're going to see the future really change. Another aspect is that everything in the insurance space is becoming digital. Insurance providers who want to be here in 10 years must provide a full-cycle digital offering, from offering quotes and making mid-term adjustments to cancelling and renewing online.

What are microservices, and how are they integral to ICE InsureTech’s offerings?

Traditionally, changes to monolithic applications were a total nightmare. Today, with the advancements of microservices, insurance providers can easily make incremental changes and scale applications quickly to be more agile – all things that you couldn’t do before. For example, all of our clients are using our underwriting orchestration service offering consistent pricing and underwriting across multiple sales channels, including aggregators portals and back office. Our microservice architecture means our platform is extremely agile and empowers clients to launch new insurance offerings in a matter of weeks, not months.

We're getting millions of quotes from price comparisons every day. It’s a lot of digital traffic and it’s difficult to predict the peaks and troughs. The microservice architecture allows us to easily scale to meet those demands without impacting our back office platform. For example, we recently launched an innovative proposition to market which included our quote and buy aggregator microservice. Previously, the startup was receiving quotes directly through their website.

During implementation they were able to independently test and learn by pumping data through that microservice, and ramping up scale before going live. This went from hundreds of direct quotes to hundreds of thousands of quotes and more. For a start-up, this approach not only helped them test and learn, but it also kept costs down while they were in the infancy of a launch, and not requiring that level of throughput.

What problem does ICE InsureTech solve?

The insurance tech space is antiquated and incredibly complex. Systems don’t talk to each other, product launches take months or years, and innovation hasn’t kept up with other industries. We built our platform to be a highly configurable policy and claims administration engine. We allow our clients to transact insurance and evolve their products without significant IT intervention in a timely manner. Our clients can launch a new product in a matter of days and weeks, instead of the months and years that it used to take.

How has Stripe helped ICE InsureTech?

Stripe has made it easy for us to integrate with their solution, providing excellent technical explanation and consultancy for Stripe’s standard Connect and platform Connect solution. Stripe has also provided concrete and practical answers to potential business challenges, and has offered card solutions in new territories without any changes to our current integration.

We have worked closely together to help accelerate the creation and approval of accounts for customers who are launching in tight timelines, with no requirement for a standard eight-week banking sign-off. By allowing for customers to self-service and self-create accounts within minutes, we can have both a fully operational test setup and subsequently live setup within days.

How do ICE InsureTech’s values align with Stripe?

Stripe and ICE InsureTech are both API-first companies. But more important than technology, we both like to work in partnership with our clients. We've been awarded InsurTech 100, Xcelent Advanced Technology Award, and SME Surrey Business Awards’ Business of the Year for our advanced technology, and it’s a privilege to serve some of the UK's largest insurance companies and an exciting new venture as we expand our reach globally with our first New Zealand client.

We know what we're meant to do and we do it well. But most of all, I think it’s our collaboration that has made this partnership long-lasting and successful – and we’re just getting started.