Case study: Modernising and scaling Dale Underwriting Partners' underwriting process with Optalitix Quote

‍The Stats

‍The Client

Established in 2014 and operating through Lloyd’s Syndicate 1729, Dale Underwriting Partners (Dale) is a specialist provider of insurance and reinsurance across six core classes: Property (Re)insurance, Casualty, Healthcare Liability, Specialty, Marine Reinsurance and Energy.

Aligned with its vision of building a high-quality, value-driven, sustainable underwriting business, Dale has always recognized the role that cutting-edge technology plays in creating a lean and efficient business model fit for the future. The ability to consistently adapt to ever-changing market conditions and optimize opportunities for further growth, for Dale, relies on a prudent operating model embedded seamlessly within their underwriting management process.

In 2023, and writing £450m of gross written premium, Dale continued to further enhance their underwriting processes, with Optalitix playing a central role in this project.

The Business Challenge

Dale wanted to move their underwriting systems to the cloud and harness the additional tools this would give them.  

However, transitioning their pricing models to the cloud posed a development challenge, potentially leading to several years of system disruption and necessitating substantial investment. The risk associated with altering the current pricing logic, was of course a concern, as such a shift in methodology could disrupt operations and jeopardize their control over existing models.

They came to Optalitix to solve this with their underwriting workbench platform, Optalitix Quote. This platform not only offered a cutting-edge solution to the cloud migration challenge but also aligned with Dale's commitment to leveraging technology for sustainable growth.

The Solution

Dale were Optalitix’s mentors at Lloyd’s Lab and saw real value in our product from an early stage. The Optalitix Quote platform together with Optalitix Models provided the no-code solution they were looking for, allowing them to create the initial component for the Dale underwriting workbench without having to recode their models into a new system, saving them significant development cost.

It allowed the underwriters to keep control of the existing models and make changes and updates whenever required. It gave them all the benefits of scale, the speed of a cloud-based system and the data to enhance the underwriting process.

Optalitix provided a 5-step onboarding process to enable them to convert their models, setting out a clear timescale and providing the platform to enable the conversion. Optalitix also provided analytical staff to speed up the move of the models into the system and provided support for the changes to the underwriting departments. The key objective was speed to deployment, with most departments live within 2 months of kicking off.

The new underwriting process with Optalitix Quote includes an automated integration with their policy administration system, improving data accuracy and reducing multiple data entry, allowing the underwriters to focus on their underwriting rather than administration tasks. It also provides automated document and email generation meaning Dale can respond quickly to the brokers to ensure they write the deals they want to.

In just 6 months, 3 departments were quoting live business and a further 4 will be live by the end of 2023 making up a vast majority of the $450m annually written premium.

Optalitix Quote allowed Dale to embed their existing models in a no-code solution, reducing the system development time and the speed to market.

Benefits for Dale

After a short training session, Dale’s underwriters can price risks with a user-friendly quote platform and automatically bind risks in their policy admin system. Importantly, the system is designed for underwriters, making it easy for them to use, with existing models and processes built in including external data feeds, and it will provide greater underwriter insight in future as new cloud service are added to the system such as geo-mapping and hazard data.

Optalitix Quote has delivered significant benefits to Dale:

1. Improved risk management systems and modernised the business by becoming more digital. Digitisation helps Dale capture more data on underwriting, enabling them to understand and manage their risks better.
2. Enhanced visibility and insight into quotes issued across all Dale business lines, enabling better decisions.
3. It will help them meet Lloyd’s new pricing standard set out in Lloyd’s Pricing Maturity Matrix.
4. They have created a key component of their future underwriting platform that allows them to centralise risk management and improve coordination of underwriting.
5. Underwriting has become more efficient, avoiding multiple data entry from the quote capture, quote calculation and quote bind stages of the process.
6. They can update the models themselves when they need to create value through agility and saving costs of paying for external development.

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We share Optalitix’s vision for a digitalised marketplace and value the benefits we are getting from the Optalitix Quote Platform, which include greater insight due to the capture of detailed pricing information, allowing us to leverage our own data more effectively, and opening up the potential for third party data enrichment, portfolio optimisation and real-time analysis.

        Jon O’Neill, Head of Data at Dale

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