Rising Edge cut time to market 4x and wrote its first policy in six months with hx

Background

Rising Edge is a boutique, client-focused underwriting agency and MGA with expertise in Directors' and Officers' liability insurance and risk management.

Rising Edge CEO, Philippe Gouraud, wanted a platform with the flexibility, agility, and scalability to promptly deliver innovative solutions to customers and allow the company's underwriters and actuaries to build better models and access higher-quality data. After reviewing some options in the market, the company considered building this platform from scratch until hx was recommended by David Hughes, founder of Mulberry Risk, a consultancy providing actuarial, analytical, and capacity management services to MGAs.

Rising Edge chose hx since it's a highly flexible platform that allows easy integrations via APIs and combines effortlessly with other business systems, improving the overall efficiency of the company's underwriting strategy.

Challenge

Launched in the first half of 2021, Rising Edge is a new business with an opportunity to enter the market with optimised tools and processes to set it apart from competitors and ensure stronger broker and client outcomes.

Rising Edge wanted to capture as much data as possible to support better analytics for the future and avoid time-consuming processes like underwriter rekeying, which typically costs insurers over 30% of valuable underwriting time.

Solution

The Rising Edge team first designed an optimised end-to-end underwriting, claims and financial management tool from scratch, including a sophisticated and agile pricing model. Rising Edge set up a project management team led by Miles Murphy, its Finance Director and Chief Operating Officer, and selected Lucid UX, a software and data solutions company, and Mulberry Risk to build its proprietary platform. The Mulberry team is responsible for developing Rising Edge's models, leveraging hx and collaborating with the hyperexponential and Rising Edge teams.

With hx, the Mulberry team has successfully developed four models with several sub-models for Rising Edge. The model build and refining process was made easy by hx, enabling real-time changes to models based on underwriter feedback. With seamless integration with internal tools, processes that take hours per risk for traditional underwriting firms can be performed in seconds by Rising Edge - allowing its underwriters to focus on its clients and brokers, write more profitable business, drive growth and free up time for learning and development.

Rising Edge also enjoys real-time risk-adjusted rate change, in-tool audit and compliance capabilities to help ensure adherence to guidelines and regulations, and simple and secure API connections to the policy admin system, eliminating data re-keying and automating renewals. hx provides highly structured data to enable automated and consistent reporting on aggregations and accumulations which is essential to securing and retaining capacity, and making data driven decisions to steer the business, ensuring alignment to plan and driving profitability.

Results

Rising Edge successfully wrote its first policy in May 2021, only six months after development started in November 2020. hx was instrumental in helping Rising Edge launch into the market, enabling the first pricing model to be built, refined, and finalised within the first three months. This process would typically take insurers between 12 to 18 months when building systems from scratch — a 4x acceleration in model build time compared to the industry standard, resulting in immediate, tangible ROI for Rising Edge. With hx in place, Rising Edge could launch to the market faster with the necessary structure to meet customer demands and stay competitive.

In today's world, being able to react quickly to the rapidly changing market is a business imperative for MGAs. hx empowers MGAs with the speed and confidence to better enable their underwriting teams – and the benefits don't stop there.