Turning challenges into opportunities is coded into the very DNA of Ignite Systems, which enjoyed its first full year as a Verisk business in 2022. And building out a successful policy administration system has been no mean feat according to CEO Toby MacLachlan (pictured), particularly considering the turbulent road to gaining credibility with brokers and insurers alike while simultaneously keeping up with the wider market and the latest tech.
“You can see why there aren’t too many players in this space, and why a lot of them fall at the first hurdles,” he said. “But I think you have to look upon these challenges within the industry as opportunities otherwise you’d quit and give up.”
Last year was a strong year of growth for the Ignite team, which increased its team by 21% in Q3 alone and now commands a team of some 50 teammates. The other key area of growth, he said, was that of furthering its insurance panel now that Ignite is a known name with backing from both big insurers and some top-50 brokers.
“We signed three new clients in the last quarter, which has been great and they are in implementation at the moment,” he said. “What has also been gratifying is our progress with insurers and getting access to insurers’ rates through IHP integration - which is a really difficult thing to achieve as a software house, to be sufficiently high up on their list.
“So we’ve done integrations with a few major UK insurers that are about to be announced which is fantastic as it builds out our motor, pet and household panel members to allow us to reach out to many more prospective brokers and clients. We’ve launched touring caravan products, we’ve launched our gap product. And we’ve also done some really brilliant work on a multi vehicle product as well.”
A key area of focus for Ignite in the year ahead is continuing to support its broker partners, MacLachlan said – both larger brokers and the smaller start-ups who are continuing to drive exciting progress and change across the market.
“The ones that tend to be really exciting are often the CEOs of companies that have got fed up with big corporate life and want to start off with new, cool tech and do it all as they would have done if they could in their big company,” he said. “That seems to be a real area for us and it’s something we’re looking to continue to support in the coming year, because a lot of people would like to set up their own brokerage and use their experience, but come up against the barriers to entry of cost and technology. And we are driving down the cost of owning technology through the work that we do to make our products very easy to deploy. And if people have the right experience, we’re able to support them financially through that early stage as well.”
Working so closely with their partners has given MacLachlan and his team a keen insight into what brokers – both large and small – are looking for in a partnership. The big theme he has seen over the past year or two is bigger brokers wanting to revamp their digital experience. They want customers to be able to self serve online, he said, they want chatbots, they want live chat and they want proper CRM integrations.
Brokers have historically been wary of changing their core operating platform to achieve these types of things. But a lot of broking is becoming so digitally led these days that even if you are a service broker who champions speaking to clients on the phone, being able to also offer these services has become incredibly important. On that note, Ignite is implementing a couple of systems this year for classic car brokers, he said, supporting medium-to-large classic car brokers who traditionally would have just spoken to clients over the phone but are now looking to provide a suite of digital tools.
Examining the backdrop against which these market changes are unfolding, MacLachlan highlighted that something that has struck him as Ignite has grown is the accessibility of access to products from insurers.
“I expected it to [become] a lot easier than it has,” he said. “Because there is IHP and insurers offer connectivity for their products - and they host them in-house, and they have their own tech strategies for doing that - you would expect them just to have a nice API that you’d integrate into… But that is very much not the case, as I’ve discovered over the last year or two.
“Now that we are accelerating into this space, and developing more and more product lines through more insurers, we’re seeing the scale of the tech legacy that these insurers have, even though there is IHP, is just crushing. And I think one of the key reasons the whole industry is being held back in terms of its ability to adopt insurtech is that they’re just not able to integrate.”
The barrier to entry of this inability is colossal and while Ignite is doing a good job in helping to break those down, from his perspective, it remains the biggest challenge for the sector. Taking Ignite’s core single-code based, cloud-based system which works so well for brokers, for example, he said, if you can’t get the product from insurers to support it, you can’t move it along. Even for Ignite, it’s taking months to break down those doors with insurers.
“Sometimes the dialogue is that brokers are slow to adopt change,” he said. “But I think actually that’s not the case. Brokers, in my experience, are very willing to adopt change and to be entrepreneurial and to try new digital technologies, even to replace their core policy admin system. But if the products they sell are not supported on that new platform by insurers, they simply can’t change.
“So that will limit everyone’s market until the insurers sort themselves out. Which is why in our roadmap for next year, we’re developing an IHP Solution that we will licence to insurers. And we will do it in the Ignite way, which is with a low cost of ownership. The guiding principle of it will be that anyone can integrate to this without cost. And that will open up products to the wider market and introduce competition that I think will be good for everyone.”
What do you think are the key challenging prevent the uptake of new and innovative insurance solutions? Feel free to share your thoughts in the comment box below.
