We are proud to celebrate 30 years of Polaris supporting digital trading in the UK general insurance industry. From our early beginnings, defining and delivering digital trading technology, to the record-breaking usage of our products in recent years, our journey has been one of continuous growth.
To mark this milestone, we spoke with some team members—Simon Bloomfield (Head of imarket), Jackie Childs (Senior Business Analyst), Mark Stroud (ProductWriter Manager), and Lyn Thomas (Senior Business Analyst). They shared their insights into their respective careers and how we’ve evolved to meet the ever-changing needs of our industry.
Simon Bloomfield: “As Head of imarket, I look after the technology that enables insurance companies to distribute their products through to multiple broker systems. We’re the technology that digitally connects brokers and their clients with several insurance companies. We enable more than half a million tradespeople, shop owners and other small businesses to buy their policies.”
Mark Stroud: “I’m a ProductWriter Manager, and proud to say ProductWriter is the most widely used rating engine in the UK, with 80+ organisations using it to produce billions of insurance quotes each month.
My role involves helping our customers make the most of the product suite, as well as working with some of the best ProductWriter experts in the industry to ensure we keep developing the platform in ways that really benefit our users.”
Lyn Thomas: “Jackie and I are senior business analysts on the Standards team. We spend a lot of time talking to brokers, insurers, and IT providers to understand what they need to transact digitally. Then we go away and design a common approach – what we call Standards – that they can all implement into their system to sell those products. That covers things like what information customers need to provide just once in order to get a quote from multiple providers.”
Jackie Childs: “There’s always a trade-off, and you have to go with the majority when you have inevitable differences of approach. At the end of the day, we deal with most of the insurance industry, and they know that we’re stronger together, and that it’s better for online trading and customer choice.”
Simon “They’re all interlinked because they’ve all evolved to help the wider insurance market to digitally trade better.
Without an industry-owned company in the middle you’d probably end up with a bit of anarchy with everyone developing the same thing for themselves. There’s a bit of altruism in Polaris’ purpose to make it easier for information to be standardised and shared digitally – and then the companies that work with us can compete on what makes them different rather than what they have in common.”
Mark: “When we speak to new customers, the key factors that set us apart are our ability to handle complex quotes and our robust governance. What makes ProductWriter unique is its versatility—it can power instant quotes from personal lines to more complex schemes like multi-fleet and multi-property portfolios, all while providing full transparency.
Insurers can clearly see and demonstrate how they arrived at their underwriting decisions, with a complete audit trail. In a heavily regulated environment where fair value product assessments are critical, this transparency is essential.”
Jackie: “I actually pre-date Polaris because I worked on the development of Standards when that was managed by the ABI and then moved across when Polaris was established.
Standards themselves began as eight great big paper folders with all the data elements and code lists. They started to be digitised and sent out to users on a disc, but it was effectively a word-processing system.
The first thing Polaris did was to develop a business process, and you’ve never seen anything like it in your life, because even the computer systems in those days were not particularly sophisticated. I remember looking at this diagram, with a big circle, and all these things like lightning bolts coming out of them in all directions.
What gave it the foundations for success was something that has remained at Polaris’ core ever since, and that is industry involvement. We worked with secondees from all the big insurers and spent a long time to make sure we got it right and that it was something they would all use.”
Simon: “In a big company your role is very defined. The joy of working in a small company is that you can craft a role which works with your skillset if you want to, and you have a lot of opportunity to develop.
I think the reason people want to stay is because we’re a bit unusual. Yes, we have a profit motive and we need to know we can pay the bills, but working at Polaris is a bit more of a cause.”
Jackie: “Yes, exactly. You’re doing something to help organisations and their customers.”
Lyn: “That is certainly a big motivator. You’ll go to a meeting where there are lots of companies that compete with each other in a room, and your job is effectively to facilitate how they all reach a consensus and work with them to get there.”
Jackie: “When I started at Sun Alliance you sat in an office and the phone rang or someone walked into the office, and you’d give them a quote. I worked in a broker’s office for about six months, and that was getting all these rating books out and manually producing the quote. You couldn’t compare the whole market, so if you were in a hurry you used the book that gave you the quickest quote.
Then you’d have to write out a cover note and send it off to the Insurer who used typing pools to type up the policy and the certificate.”
Simon: “Even as late as the late ’90s, I remember in branches, if somebody came to the counter in your office and wanted a private car quote, you’d get the manual out and work out a private quote.
It used to take a month to get a policy by the time the insurer had reviewed the information and prepared the documentation.”
Lyn: “Today the rates are changing daily, even on an hourly basis with some insurers. They monitor their pricing and volumes so closely that they can fine tune in real time.”
Jackie: “And if you’re writing an unexpectedly high amount of business for similar risks you can identify why, quickly determine whether you’ve made a mistake in the rating, and correct that too.”
Mark: “It’s gone from people manually producing those quotes to underwriters putting their underwriting and pricing guides into ProductWriter which can automate quotes for software houses and providers own websites etc, across personal and some commercial lines.
In personal lines now there is an expectation amongst the aggregators that it’s got to be a sub-second response to it. So customers key the information in, and if you’re not getting your automated response back in sub-seconds, it doesn’t hit the aggregators.”
Lyn: “I think it comes down to distribution and choice. Insurers want to deal with as many brokers as possible. Software houses want to deal with as many insurers as possible. So people realised that to achieve that you’ve got to come up with a common approach of communication.”
Simon: “I’d put it probably more simply than that. From a distribution perspective, if it’s something that is unique to you, that you can do by yourself, you don’t come to Polaris. If it’s something that requires the market to go with you, and you need to work in collaboration with other people to make that happen, that’s when they come into our area. ProductWriter can be less about commonality, as we see insurers also doing more bespoke products through that.”
Mark: “If we can deliver the common parts to them, then they can concentrate on the things that make them unique. Although ProductWriter is slightly different in that we also work with those individuals who work by themselves.”
Jackie: “Polaris is a conduit for best practice. We know that, but if you can sit in a meeting and share things that aren’t competitive, everyone benefits.”
Jackie: “When Flood Re was created insurers needed to know if certain conditions were met that would mean they could cede flood risk to the government-backed pool. The problem was that the information wasn’t captured at the time, so Polaris set up a process to allow for that information to be recorded.”
Lyn: “When common data is required by more than one party Polaris comes into its own. We go through the legislation, work out what information we need to capture, and build it into imarket.”
Jackie: “More recently BIBA brought the issue of e-scooters, which their members had raised, into our standards forum. They were interested to know how many claims had arisen under household insurance. At that point one of the insurers said they were recorded under pedal cycles, because they didn’t have a code. We’ve added those codes now. I know we can’t answer that question for BIBA retrospectively, but we can now help them going forwards.”
Mark: “Moving ProductWriter to the cloud. We weren’t sure it was going to work but then when the pandemic hit it proved to be a game charger that kept the industry operating.”
Jackie: “For me it’s helping to get Flood Re up and running and adapting the standards to set up an employer’s liability database for ELTO [The Employers’ Liability Tracing Office].”
Lyn: “What I’m most proud of really isn’t a moment or a project, it’s Polaris’ reputation with our customers, as the first port of call. It’s a privilege to be the advice and guidance givers.”
Simon: “The first project I worked on was on Good Customer Outcomes. We worked with RWA to articulate what that meant and then tested broker and insurer systems against that.
It uncovered some instances where data wasn’t been appropriately shared, for example if a broker detailed vehicle modifications when they applied for a quote in their software platform, that information didn’t reach the insurer, and the quote was returned with T&Cs including that it’s assumed there are no modifications.
We came up with some guidance around best practice that if you can’t quote for something that is considered to be key cover, you should be declining to quote.
I really enjoyed that because it introduced a level of thinking in standards to see things through the customer’s eyes.”
Mark: “We’ll be wherever our customers are.”
Simon: “We’ll continue evolving, along with and in support of our customers, to keep meeting the needs of the market.”
Jackie: “Making sure we keep pace with insurers or ahead of them.”
Lyn: “Continuing to be the first port of call to discuss digital trading practices for our customers.”
Read more about our team and the story of Polaris here
