When Sydney-based Blue Zebra Insurance (BZI) came to life in 2017, the vision for the business was clear – to put insurtech at the heart of BZI as the firm galloped into becoming a large-scale underwriting agency. Here chief technology officer Amar Roomi (pictured), who is speaking at the upcoming Insurance Business Tech Fest Australia, shared how it all began and the bigger fruits BZI is now reaping.
“There’s a real bottleneck in terms of being able to come up with innovative insurance ideas and actually being able to go to market with them,” said Roomi, referring to costly and time-intensive technology transformation programmes.
“So, when we started the company,” he noted, “the core concern for us was, ‘How do we make sure that we’re able to go to market with new products at a pace that’s significantly quicker than our competitors and at the same time make sure that we’re a digital-first agency as well’.
“Because the more we streamline the interaction between our brokers and our platform, the more our business is going to grow in terms of policy count. So, that was the rationale behind why technology was such a big focus for us, even from day zero.”
Part of the plan, according to the CTO, was to keep the BZI roster small to avoid bureaucracy that could slow down the agency’s development. Also, among the priorities was making sure that as the business grew, back-end operations didn’t suffer as a result of that growth and operational efficiency was sustained.
A mathematician by trade, whose expertise spans pricing and data science and whose credentials include years spent at a major insurer, Roomi came onboard soon after the underwriting agency launched its first product. As CTO, he was tasked with scaling BZI’s built-from-scratch insurance platform, Blue Leopard, across a number of dimensions.
The platform, part of which is the Zebra Lounge used by the company’s broking partners to transact business, started out with home insurance and now offers a total of seven products. Developed and improved based on broker feedback, Blue Leopard is updated every two weeks to constantly enhance user experience.
With more than 100 releases since the platform was first rolled out, it looks like BZI has pretty much nailed it. Now, the business has the capacity to share the technology with its industry peers.
“There’s been a lot of interest in our platform, Blue Leopard, by other underwriting agencies and insurers, so a clear focus for us in 2021 and beyond is actually to sell that platform as a service,” revealed Roomi. “And we already have a couple of clients on the go at the moment to hop on to the platform.
“And it’s rewarding because it’s recognition for the hard work of the team here over the last three years to build a platform, originally just for Blue Zebra. It has that recognition of saying, ‘We’d love to pick up your system and use it for our own needs’.”
For the chief technology officer, it’s a “real opportunity” to help push the industry as a whole towards what he believes is a more modern way of doing business.
“Effectively it’s white labelling, but it’s a deeper white label than most people are used to,” Roomi told Insurance Business. “This is taking the platform and all the automation benefits it brings with it and effectively helping these underwriting agencies or insurers actually transform the way they operate.”
Roomi is among the speakers for the insurtech stream at this year’s IB Tech Fest taking place on May 13 in Sydney. Register now.
