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Jack Boult on Outstanding Claims with the PriceWriter Ep 6
49 Plays2 years ago
In this captivating episode of Outstanding Claims, we dive into the world of insurance pricing, innovation, and the dynamic landscape of startups. Our guest, Jack Boult, brings a wealth of experience from the general insurance industry, where he shares his journey from a diverse career path to his current role at Napo, a startup in the pet insurance space.
Episode Highlights:
- Explores the challenges and opportunities within the startup environment, including the freedom to implement new ideas,
- The importance of collaboration across departments, and the integration of technology such as the collaboration tool, Notion.
- Exciting developments and trends shaping the industry.
- Jack's passion for pricing and his mission to leverage his broad industry knowledge to revolutionize pet insurance.
Join us for this enlightening conversation with Jack Boult, as we uncover the intriguing world of insurance pricing, startups, and the continuous pursuit of pricing excellence.
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Transcript
Jack's Passion for Insurance
00:00:00
Speaker
When I came into pricing and general insurance, I really loved it. And straight away, I knew that that was a thing for me. That's where I'll be staying. I'm joined by Jack Boot from the startup Pat and Sharon Nappay. Nappay, our client, the price writer, he has an impressive background in general insurance pricing with a deep knowledge of Pat.
00:00:19
Speaker
although he started off in life and pensions. Outside of work, Jack's wife is a retired head teacher, retraining as a solicitor, and they have an entrepreneur son who is owner, founder, and director of a call center called Hero PA. Hello, Javkin. Welcome to the show. Hi Jeremy. Thanks for having me on. Great to have you on this afternoon.
Early Career Explorations
00:00:43
Speaker
So the first thing I want to ask you is, how did you get where you are today?
00:00:48
Speaker
It's an interesting question. Yeah. So the first 10 years of my career, I'd actually describe it as meandering around quite a bit. So yeah, actually 1998, January, 1998, I actually started Life Assurance as an actuarial student.
00:01:07
Speaker
And in 2000, I then went into pensions, particularly the pension review era was happening back then. I'll go into the programming side, but rather than just doing the case work, it was Excel and VBA.
00:01:23
Speaker
programming. So it gave me a VBA slant. When the pension review for the STAP company disappeared and I was out looking for a job again, I actually left back to where I really worked for a while.
Transition to General Insurance
00:01:33
Speaker
Yeah. It was VBA coding, then an internal wave into compliance such as investment compliance. I didn't actually come into general insurance till 2009. So a whole decade of moving around all over the place. And when I came into pricing and general insurance, I really loved it. And straight away I knew that that was a thing for me. That's where I'd be staying.
00:01:53
Speaker
One thing that kind of struck me, I was 10 years older than a lot of the other ones, I had to compete with these bright guys. So I became very keen on telematics. And that led to me then being good research and development, actually, where I was with Marcus study at the time, and they wanted to go into new areas. There was telematics, it was leading them into pet insurance, a bit of gap and warranty. Yeah, I became very much a product development side of pricing.
00:02:22
Speaker
And then late 2013, I went contracting, got my household experience, but always check that slant on the product development side. And yeah, that's what really helped me as a contractor. I could do both business as usual contracts, but also contracts to develop new products. And I've got that string to my bow. So that was, yeah, that, that was a massive help.
Permanent Role at Napo
00:02:46
Speaker
And then more recently I've left contracting and become head of pricing at Napo, which is a startup in pet insurance. It has been right on the street because I've done pet insurance several times before, always for my kind of product development slants as well. Started doing pet insurance was absolutely ideal for me. How prompted the return from contracting into a permanent role? What I found with contracting is that
00:03:14
Speaker
Some contracts were things I could earn ages ago and some contracts were interesting and some weren't so interesting. I just thought as a contractor, I'm not getting the opportunity to develop management skills. So let's take a permanent role where I can manage people and develop some other skills and have some new experience.
00:03:35
Speaker
Yeah, I think that is something people find with contracting. It's great that you maybe get a bit tight cast and a bit stuck at the level you were when you went into it. So what's it like at Netpo?
00:03:49
Speaker
Nice. Yeah, it's been very interesting working with a lot of people that are not from an insurance background. Most of the claims people are from an insurance background, but any other department there, they're not from an insurance background. Yeah. So a lot of learning on, I sort of have to run a startup.
00:04:08
Speaker
The startup culture, even the software that the startups typically use, such as notion, that doesn't appear in large insurance companies, but it's right from one startup. It's a lot of startup type learning. We wasn't expecting them. And then of course the management and leadership learning that I was expecting. And what would you say then is your mission for pricing at Napa?
Innovations in Pet Insurance
00:04:36
Speaker
I'd say my mission is to bring in all the experience I have, all the many insurance that I've worked up and even life assurance and pensions knowledge, bring that all in and then apply it in the area of pet insurance. There's so much that can be done that can be brought in from major insurance and
00:05:01
Speaker
that is really useful to have all that broke backgrounds out under multiple patent shows. Firstly, it can be very innovative by having all that background and bringing in famous patent insurance that the patent insurance hasn't had previously.
00:05:16
Speaker
Um, but then, then secondly, even without that kind of innovative slum, just simply having had a lot of experience, taking the best part of all that experience in any scenario, applying best of what I've seen previously. And so I, one thing that I always think of with that is that, uh, I once had the Tiger Woods was trained that way.
00:05:45
Speaker
If he copied the best in the world in every situation, the best in the world, driving the best of the best in the bank and made himself the second best in the world at everything by copying the best in the world, then overall he would be the best in the world. So the way I like to think of it with developing pricing at Napo, taking the best of what I've seen in every situation and applying that.
00:06:09
Speaker
That's about taking the best of what people do in other areas, the other insurances, perhaps, or in pet insurance, actually bringing it all together to make something that's better than with some of the parts. Yeah, very much. That's my philosophy. That's brilliant. And you find it a startup and you've got more of the freedom to actually do that.
00:06:33
Speaker
Yeah, certainly. Yeah. So I've, I've been able to, I've been able to implement quite, quite a lot of things because it's been a blank, blank sheet.
00:06:45
Speaker
Interesting. I've done the research and development myself. Sometimes in organizations that doesn't always make it into the final. It's sometimes quite rightly, but sometimes it can be a bit frustrating that you do a lot of the development side of you. Maybe found that you're now free to actually get some of these things implemented.
00:07:06
Speaker
It's always the one thing you do find in a startup is an immense amount of challenge. You're always up against more challenge because the people around you have not come from an insurance background. Then yes, things that you would think would be kind of
00:07:29
Speaker
Well, more straightforward and wouldn't be challenged are going to be challenged because there's people around you who haven't done the insurance before. So they're going to challenge everything rather than just the perhaps what you might think in the insurance. Yeah. If you're in, if you're surrounded by insurance people, it might be the more maverick things that got challenged. Whereas the startup everything is going to be, it's going to be challenging. Yeah. But when you're starting with that blank sheet, then yeah, see it.
00:07:58
Speaker
What you want to do is going to go in. Yeah. Yeah. That sounds great. It sounds like a really good environment. And so I always describe my vision is every insurance customer paying the exact right price for their insurance. What would you say is your vision for the future of insurance pricing?
Opportunities in Commercial Lines
00:08:17
Speaker
The future of insurance pricing, I see it in several areas of pricing. So at the moment right now, I think there's a great opportunity with commercial lines and London market, because what they're finding is that if you've only got a hundred policies, then you're not going to be doing such GLMs and things. But what they've found recently is that actually they've got a hundred policies that have each got an average of a thousand commercial properties on per policy.
00:08:45
Speaker
Yeah. And now they're actually, at one point they just had a border row and probably didn't know where half those trial policies were. Whereas now they do, they've got great details. So they've now got a hundred thousand properties worth of data. It's the randomization that's going on, isn't it? And like it started off in the personal side. It's taken over the commercial. Now we're seeing it happening in London markets. It just seems to, yeah, ultimately it is the way forward. You've got the data.
00:09:15
Speaker
Yeah. And the same thing, there's also the spreading out within personal lives in that thing was start with motor and then forgot the household and now progressed to, progressed to pet insurance. So a very good example then optimization. Importantly, the optimization, to always remember, it perhaps picked up a bit of a bad label because of GIP, but really we're talking about offering the optimum price to achieve the objectives.
00:09:44
Speaker
These objectives should include treating customers well. Yeah, and I think one thing that often gets overlooked on optimisation is partly down to the fact that a lot of the insurance industry insists on calling claims models, risk models. There's a lot of other risks involved.
00:10:06
Speaker
Pay aggregator fees being able to cover that aggregator fee. So having propensity to renew model helps a lot there. It tells you whether you're going to have to cover the cover the fee in one year or over five years. Yeah. Indeed. A lot of the, a lot of the models that are, that are going into optimization are actually, I would say very much to do with risk and very much to do with fairness.
00:10:33
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. That's right. I often characterize optimization as being about giving the people that run the company the correct neighbors and controls to set the prices. Because that way, like you said, you can make decisions like, should I look at this VA this number of years or that number of years? In a suggestion aware, that could be quite complicated to model. Whereas when you move into the optimization,
00:10:58
Speaker
You can put that into the giant formulas as a constraint and actually see that evolve and what will happen before you go out to market. So in fact, it allows you to make better decisions.
Collaboration and Team Dynamics
00:11:12
Speaker
But another area that I'm noticing that's very much developing in pricing is combinations of and hybrids of models. So you've got data robots, which not only does it go away and find the best algorithm, but then looks at composite algorithm. Yeah. That's probably the best model. This is 50% XG boost. Yeah.
00:11:38
Speaker
25% light based and 25% some kind of linear model. And then you've got insurers starting to look at over the top of GLMs, what can they do if the residuals did to get a bit of improvement on the GLM perhaps less.
00:11:57
Speaker
GBM on the residuals. Yeah. And you've also got the same thing going on with optimization that make sure I was looking at layers of optimization that they get the optimization halfway there.
00:12:10
Speaker
with perhaps a model down optimization and then really fine tune it with dynamic optimization. Yeah, in light environment. Yeah, that definitely is what happening. It's interesting how we never seem to come to the end of this journey. We've been improving, building more complicated models, getting the price more accurate for customers for a long time now. And actually that's just such a long road in front of us. We say much more. The best.
00:12:36
Speaker
players in the market. Again, they're right balance between having pricing entries, having people working in pricing that are non-actuaries, ringing in pricing experts from industries outside insurance. So you've got the utilities,
00:12:53
Speaker
Airlines or all of that type of experience bringing that into GI. And then you've got the data scientists, like you can be bringing in GI data scientists, but you can also be bringing in data scientists from outside general insurance. There, you know, Facebook ones sure now have to do AB testing. Yeah.
00:13:14
Speaker
They are the winners, the winners in pricing and going to be the ones that get that right blend of intellectual diversity amongst the star. Yeah, absolutely. I was showing to, I was seeing Malek on a previous episode and he runs the claims for Aviva. And he was saying how they are in putting so many more varied skill sets than they ever used to. You say why it used to be claims handlers. Now they've got teams of data scientists and other roles.
00:13:44
Speaker
And in fact, it's interesting how pricing teams, there's a lot of functions we used to do, like testing and developing and the deployment. That should be now getting specialists to do that. So you've got pricing developers, you've got price testers, and actually that's really good. And this skill is coming in from outside to real change as well. And it used to be rather an underwriting thing to have people particularly skilled in, say, airlines for travel or that's for the path.
00:14:13
Speaker
Whereas now people are really seeing the value of not only training the pricing team on having that wider industry knowledge, but also getting people with that knowledge into the teams that can really help
Conclusion and Industry Reflections
00:14:25
Speaker
and drive forward. That's probably saying.
00:14:29
Speaker
Yeah. And the collaboration as well across departments. Yeah, that's improved. It's interesting you mentioned Notion. So it's a fantastic tool for collaboration. It's a shame. I don't know. Big insurance using it. Then there might be one. I don't know, but it does make a big difference.
00:14:47
Speaker
Thanks a lot this afternoon, Jack, for taking the time to meet. It's been really interesting. It's been a pleasure to be on your show, Jeremy. Brilliant. Thanks very much. You have a good day. Okay. Thanks. Cheers. Bye-bye.