Technology in modern insurance: building in-house tech teams

Carbon Underwriting’s CTO came from BlueCrest, a hedge fund where his last project involved getting trade times from 30 down to 20 milliseconds. When he arrived in insurance, the benchmark was different: getting a receipt from 90 days to 60 would have everyone celebrating.

That gap reflects the scale of the opportunity sitting inside technology transformation in modern insurance. The organizations pulling ahead are not those purchasing off-the-shelf vendor solutions. They are building dedicated technology functions in-house, treating software development as a core business capability rather than a support service. Ben Laidlaw, Managing Director and co-founder of Carbon Underwriting, joined Amrit Santhirasenan on The Underwriting Intelligence Podcast to discuss exactly how that shift happens and what it takes to sustain it.

The conversation covers how Carbon grew from three co-founders with an idea, to a Lloyd’s syndicate approaching £500M in premium, with technology embedded at every stage.

Key takeaways

• Building proprietary platforms can create defensible advantages for some insurers.

• Hiring technologists exclusively from outside insurance brings fresh perspectives unburdened by legacy assumptions.

• Maintaining a 25-40% technologist workforce ratio sends a cultural signal that attracts top talent.

• Co-locating technical and underwriting teams and creating hybrid “quant” roles builds technology literacy across the entire organization.

What does technology in modern insurance actually mean?

Technology in modern insurance encompasses the in-house development of data platforms, analytics capabilities, and digital infrastructure that fundamentally changes how underwriting operations run.

Carbon Underwriting illustrates the distinction clearly. The founding team concluded early that purchased solutions offer no defensible advantage: if a small startup could find vendors to assemble a tech stack, bigger companies with better resources could replicate it. Building internally does create lasting differentiation.

Carbon positioned itself as a people-based underwriter with a proprietary technology stack. Many insurers wrestle with whether they are a technology company that happens to do insurance or an insurer with a tech stack. How you answer that question shapes organizational design, hiring strategy, and ultimately competitive positioning in the London market.

Why proprietary platforms matter for competitive advantage in insurance

The case for building proprietary technology platforms rests on three pillars.

First, defensible differentiation. Custom-built platforms create lasting differentiation that purchased solutions cannot replicate. Carbon’s platform, Graphene, has become so embedded in how the company operates that, as the team describes it, Carbon is Graphene and Graphene is Carbon.

Second, the data utilization gap. The founding team recognized that data utilization within the delegated business space was substandard, not because the data did not exist, but because organizations were not using what was already available. Even small changes to how bordereaux data was handled, presented, and acted upon could drive meaningfully better underwriting decisions for cover holders and partners.

Third, talent attraction. Positioning technology as a service to the business rather than part of the business makes it harder to recruit top technologists. A meaningful technologist ratio attracts more top technologists, creating a culture that draws in the talent you need.

How underwriting operations transform with in-house platforms

Carbon’s experience points to two specific areas where in-house platforms change how underwriting actually works: how data reaches the desk, and whether underwriters trust it enough to act on it.

Data-driven decision making

Carbon’s earliest technology work focused on something deceptively simple: handling bordereaux data, presenting that data to underwriters, and enabling decisions off the back of it. The goal was to get information into underwriters’ hands so they could drive decisions quickly and fairly, giving a more consistent and appropriate level of cover to cover holders.

This is where technology in modern insurance delivers real operational value: giving underwriters the right conclusions at the right time so they can focus on judgment rather than data wrangling.

Building trust in the platform

Any underwriter who has worked with a new system knows the instinct: when something looks off, you jump back to a spreadsheet. That reflex is natural, but it limits the value of every dollar invested in technology.

As Ben Laidlaw discussed on the podcast, this confidence question is central to unlocking returns on technology investment. As he explained, “That confidence is really, really important because it absolutely allows you to unlock the value of the developments and investments you made.”

Building an in-house insurance technology function: key components

Executing this strategy requires deliberate choices about hiring, team composition, and organizational structure.

Hiring from outside the industry

Carbon has taken an unconventional approach to technology hiring. To this day, the company has never employed anyone from within the insurance sector to work on its tech stack. As Ben Laidlaw put it during the conversation, “If you’re coming in to challenge what is an archaic and older methodology of trade… you need to have different ideas coming in.”

This approach carries trade-offs. New hires require significant upskilling on insurance concepts like limit, layering, and the mechanics of delegated business. But the result is a team with a genuinely different set of skills and institutional knowledge, unburdened by legacy assumptions about how things have always been done.

Maintaining technology ratios

Carbon started with roughly 40% of its workforce in technology roles. As the company scaled, that proportion moved to around 30%, settling at around 25%. The ratio matters for capability and as a cultural signal. A quarter of the company working in technology roles gives the organization a hyper-technology flavor that permeates everything, from how decisions get made to how new hires evaluate the role.

Integrating technology teams with insurance operations

Successful technology in modern insurance requires both the platform and the working relationship between technical and underwriting teams that makes it useful day to day.

Eliminating physical and organizational separation

One of the simplest and most impactful decisions Carbon made was seating technologists and underwriters next to each other. The proximity builds mutual understanding and eliminates the division that undermines so many insurance technology initiatives. When technologists and underwriters share the same floor, questions get answered in minutes rather than weeks, and priorities align through conversation rather than competing project queues.

The quant model: creating hybrid roles

Carbon created a role it calls quants, though the team’s preferred title is data analytics engineers. These quants occupy a hybrid position between junior developer, junior underwriter, and junior actuary, with front-end and data skill sets.

Each quant sits within a specific underwriting team. The property-specific quant works alongside property underwriters. The liability-specific quant works with that team. They handle heavy analytical lifting in support of the platform, and underwriters get conclusions presented to them rather than raw data.

The career pathway is where this pays off. As host Amrit Santhirasenan observed during the conversation, it functions like a 21st-century, tech-oriented grad scheme. Quants typically spend two to three years in the role, then filter into different areas: actuarial, financial planning, or underwriting. People who move into senior underwriting roles carry a total belief in the platform because they helped build it, and that belief shapes how the entire organization treats technology going forward.

Carbon Underwriting’s journey: a real-world case study

The three co-founders, Ben Laidlaw, Jackie, and Nick, met at Catlin, an organization known for its academic approach to underwriting. They launched Carbon in 2018 as an MGU specializing in delegated business in the London market, with a core belief that MGA business could be written better.

In those early startup days, working out of WeWorks and car parks, the team had the luxury of time. Capacity was limited, which meant less underwriting to do but more freedom to invest in building technology IP. That constraint proved to be an advantage.

Employee number two was Mark, now the company’s CTO, hired from BlueCrest. Employee three was a junior developer reporting to Mark. Technology hiring preceded most underwriting hiring, setting a precedent that shaped everything that followed. Over the first 18 months, the team built the initial structure of what would become Graphene, a platform that has since become inseparable from the business itself.

Carbon became the first organically approved syndicate in a box and the first to graduate through to full Lloyd’s syndicate status, reaching close to £500M in premium.

Challenges insurance technology leaders should anticipate

Building in-house comes with real considerations. Carbon’s Graphene platform works well for its specific use case, but the team acknowledges it may not translate directly to other organizations. Even the data dictionary is somewhat esoteric to the rest of the market.

Maintaining innovation at scale is another challenge. As Ben Laidlaw has observed, high-growth companies often struggle when the gradient shifts from rapid scaling to steady-state operations. People feel that change in momentum, even when the business is still outperforming the market. Keeping part of the business operating like a seed-stage startup, even as the broader company matures, is one way to preserve that edge.

The competitive pressure is real too. Others recognize what technology-forward insurers are doing and are trying to replicate it. The challenge becomes remaining a challenger even as you become established.

Conclusion

Here’s what Carbon did: hire technologists early and from outside insurance, maintain meaningful technology ratios, co-locate technical and underwriting teams, and create hybrid roles that build technology literacy across every function. It is an organization that treat technology as a core capability.

For a deeper look at Carbon’s approach, listen to the full conversation between Amrit Santhirasenan and Ben Laidlaw on The Underwriting Intelligence Podcast.

How hx supports underwriting decision-making from model to desk

The outcome Carbon built toward, giving underwriters conclusions at the point of decision rather than raw data to interpret, is what hyperexponential is purpose-built to deliver. For organizations that want comparable capability without a ground-up build, the hx platform brings together the tools actuaries and underwriters need in a single workflow.

The Decision Engine gives actuaries an environment to build and deploy pricing and triage models directly. Pricing & Rating surfaces those models to underwriters at the point of decision, so the conclusions reach the desk rather than staying locked in a spreadsheet or analytics tool. Portfolio Intelligence closes the loop with real-time visibility across the book, giving underwriting and portfolio teams a shared view of how decisions are shaping performance.

See how hyperexponential translates actuarial models into underwriting decisions.

Frequently asked questions

What is the difference between an MGU and an MGA in the London market?

An MGU typically has broader underwriting authority and may manage capacity on behalf of carriers, while an MGA operates with more defined delegated authority. Carbon started as an MGU before graduating to full Lloyd’s syndicate status, a progression that reflects the company’s growth in both scale and underwriting capability.

How do binder underwriters use technology differently from open market underwriters?

Binder underwriters managing delegated business face distinct data challenges around bordereaux processing and monitoring cover holder performance across portfolios. Technology platforms built for this use case prioritize data ingestion, aggregation, and presentation at portfolio scale, rather than the individual risk assessment tools more common in open market settings.

What role does Lloyd’s syndicate in a box play in insurance technology innovation?

The syndicate in a box model provides a lower-barrier entry point for new managing agents at Lloyd’s. It allows technology-forward organizations to prove their underwriting and operational model at smaller scale before graduating to full syndicate status, reducing the capital and infrastructure commitment required to test new approaches in the market.

What is bordereaux data and why does it matter for technology in delegated insurance?

Bordereaux data refers to the detailed records of risks bound under a delegated authority agreement, typically provided by cover holders to the carrier or syndicate. Managing and acting on bordereaux data efficiently is one of the central technical challenges in delegated business, as the quality and timeliness of this data directly affects how well insurers can monitor exposure and make portfolio-level decisions.

How should insurance organizations think about technology ratios when building in-house teams?

Carbon’s experience offers a useful reference point. The company started with around 40% of its workforce in technology roles, and that proportion settled toward 25% as the business scaled. The ratio tends to compress as headcount grows, but keeping it meaningful, even at larger scale, is what sustains the cultural signal that attracts technical talent. The specific number matters less than the organizational commitment it represents.