A lot of us probably only heard about Zoom last year. For Agile Underwriting Services, the technology is nothing unfamiliar, and here chief executive and underwriting head Robin Barham (pictured) shares why the six-year-old underwriting agency operates the way it does.
“Agile was set up as remote-first from day one, actually,” Barham, who co-founded the business with tech chief Ben Webster and chief financial officer Nick Goritsas, told Insurance Business.
“We’ve always had a remote-first environment since 2015. The advantage of that – and the reason we did this in the first place – is it enables us to hire the people we want, irrespective of geography.”
According to the CEO, it’s that flexibility as an employer that allowed the Lloyd’s coverholder to onboard three returning-to-work mums, for instance.
Barham said: “We were able to get them because we could give them the ability to work around school runs and managing their family. They’re highly qualified, very smart people who otherwise we wouldn’t have been able to get. It gives us a massive advantage over the big insurance companies that were too inflexible to do it.
“We used Zoom from day one. Everything is in the cloud. We also have Slack. That was hardwired into our business from the beginning, and it’s interesting watching the rest of the world catch up.”
The move, obviously, wasn’t in anticipation of a global pandemic half a decade later, but it sure worked out when organisations needed to adjust. While firms the world over implemented their respective emergency response plans, it was business as usual at Agile.
“We wanted to run the kind of business that we wanted to work in,” asserted the industry veteran, whose more than three decades of experience spans both the UK and Australia. “I think that if we ran a successful business for 10 years, but half of our staff had nervous breakdowns or divorces or stress or whatever, then we would have failed.”
It’s no coincidence that the Sydney-based underwriting agency is called “Agile”.
“The choosing of the name was very deliberate,” said Barham. “We wanted to give insurers a way to get in and out of markets in an agile manner, but we also wanted to be a business that was agile for its staff. The beauty of starting a business with a clean sheet is you don’t have to do it the way other people think you should do it.”
