For an underwriting agency, Blue Zebra Insurance (BZI) has an unusually high number of tech staff.
Chief technology officer (CTO), Amar Roomi (pictured above) said his Sydney-headquartered firm has 55 staff out of which about 30 are operational and more than 20 are in the tech team.
Insurance Business asked if it was unusual in the industry for an agency to have almost half of its staff employed in the tech space?
“Absolutely,” said Roomi.
He said BZI will likely generate more than $300 million in gross written premiums (GWP) this year.
“So as a multiple [compared to staff numbers] it’s a really highly efficient multiple and that’s possible because that tech is there to help automate and digitize as much as we can,” he said.
In January, the company continued its tech journey by deploying Microsoft Sentinel to enhance IT security.
IB asked Roomi what this program allows BZI to do that they weren’t doing before?
“We obviously had a bunch of other [Microsoft] tools in place before we implemented Sentinel, but they were decentralized,” he said.
Roomi said they had Microsoft Defender for cloud looking after their Azure infrastructure on the applications side. They used a separate Defender arrangement to guard staff user profiles and their devices. There were also other components, he said, for general security and governance tracking.
“They were all relatively disparate and, from a maintenance perspective, we had to go through separate processes and monitoring approaches for each of those components,” said Roomi. “Sentinel does a couple of things.”
One of them, he said, was centralising information into one dashboard of information, “a single analytics workspace.”
“Instead of having to go to different places to look for information, you’re able to look at it in one spot,” said Roomi. “This is where it gets more exciting.”
In the past, he said, if an individual was logging into one of their systems in a risky fashion, perhaps by typing in the wrong password a couple of times, the rest of the IT system “didn’t necessarily know that there was a suspicious or failed attempt to log in before.”
Their technology set-up, he said, wasn’t able to bring two pieces of “suspicious” information together.
“This [Sentinel] brings them together into one spot,” said Roomi.
He said this enables them, if necessary, to “lock out that user.”
IB asked how personal this technology can be in terms of its awareness of the different people who are using it?
“Over time what it [Sentinel] tries to do is learn some patterns of behaviour that certain people have, from the devices that they use, to the locations they’re logging in from and even the typing speed of that individual as well,” said Roomi.
He said this level of security is “not quite operational yet.”
“That all happens, to a degree, behind the scenes from our perspective, but at the same time there’s a transparent view of that protection for our own monitoring and compliance needs,” said Roomi.
IB asked how difficult BZI found implementing this new Microsoft security?
He said even for his tech savvy firm there was a learning curve. BZI employed the services of tech firm, Arinco, to help with the technology transition.
“Arinco really understands the Microsoft stack in a way that made us feel comfortable because we’re pretty in the weeds when it comes to this technology,” he said. “That was a big advantage for us in implementing Sentinel - and it ended up taking eight weeks [to fully implement].”
Another novel feature of BZI: apart from their own insurance operation, their IT platform services another agency.
“We also on-sell the platform as a service,” said Roomi. “The 23 [tech] people that I mentioned are not just servicing Blue Zebra, they are servicing another agency as well.”
By way of demonstrating his firm’s efficiency, the CTO said one competitor with more than 250 staff only manages to generate about $100 million more in GWP.
“It’s a huge advantage for us to be that efficient,” said Roomi.
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