Starfish Specialty Insurance is a US-based MGA, providing specialty insurance solutions for real estate and community associations.
Challenge
The leadership team at Starfish wanted to launch a new, lean, agile, specialist MGA and understood the importance of technology in realising that goal. Their experience of legacy insurance systems was underwhelming, and they were looking for an alternative solution that would provide the stability, flexibility, and speed-to-market that they required.
Starfish’s first product, ‘FLIProtect Builders Risk Insurance’, was a non-admitted product designed to embed into a lender’s closing process, providing appropriate, just-in-time coverage to avoid delays in securing financing. The solution simplified the insurance purchasing process for the investor, satisfied the lender’s requirements, and avoided delays in financing.
The technology required to satisfy this brief had to simplify and streamline the underwriting process, call on multiple APIs for data enrichment, improve communication and provide a superior user experience for broker, underwriter, and carrier, and provide enterprise-level analytics and reporting capabilities.
After a thorough assessment of the insurance technology market, Starfish CEO, Jeremy Hitzig, and his team opted to work with insurance technology specialists, Azur Technology.
Solution
Azur Technology’s ‘MGA Connect’ product, is a fully customizable software tool, built on the Salesforce platform, and designed specifically to help MGAs manage the end-to-end insurance policy lifecycle.
The project required the team, consisting of both Starfish and Azur Technology members, to transition an original admitted/non-admitted hybrid product to a fully non-admitted, online product which utilized two raters that could calculate surplus lines taxes and fees.
Building on the Salesforce Financial Services Cloud allowed the team to integrate with the lending partner via API to automatically populate the quote with 75% of the data required; further API integrations to Verisk and CoreLogic supplement another 10% of the outstanding data. Additional technology partners included FinancialForce, Blackthorn, Stripe, ComplyAdvantage, and Inscipher.
Outcome
The entire project took six months, from initial discovery to launch. And in the first twelve months since go-live in December 2021, the solution bound over 2500 policies and $3,600,000 in gross written premium with a 33% bound policy ratio – all via one underwriter.
Thanks to data enrichment and automation, Starfish can furnish a quote in approximately three minutes, streamlining the loan close process.
Something that was not remotely possible on previous systems. Furthermore, Starfish can manage and maintain this model with no CTO or tech team – all technical aspects of maintaining the system are performed by Azur on a managed services contract, no finance team – the system does the accounting for them with minimal intervention, and just one Underwriter on this particular product – keeping overheads to a minimum.
Award-winning partnership
Azur Technology began as an in-house tech team, building solutions for Azur Underwriting, an MGA in the UK.
As other insurance companies in the US, UK and Europe saw our capabilities, they asked us to help them build their own products.
Being underwriters ourselves meant we were in a unique position to understand requirements and help others with their digitalization programs. As our reputation grew, and the underwriting business was eventually sold to Aviva, Azur Technology now exists as an independent technology provider for the insurance sector.
