Industry owned, Industry wide
Industry owned, Industry wide
Industry owned, Industry wide
As Polaris recently celebrated its 30th anniversary, we reflect on the impact of the Polaris ProductWriter Run time Environment (RTE): the backbone of the General Insurance marketplace. For over a quarter of a century, it has robustly performed its duties without complaint.
The ProductWriter RTE’s purpose is simple, take input messages from Software Houses (SWH), Price comparison Websites (PCW’ s), extranets, Policy Admin Systems (PAS), mobile apps – in fact anywhere a risk capture can be presented to a broker or consumer, and return outputs – premiums, terms & conditions, endorsements, excesses & documentation; all the necessary components of an insurance policy.
Over the past 25 years, the demands placed upon the RTE have increased dramatically requiring constant evolution, most notably the significant throughput delivered from PCW’s. It is not unusual for Insurers across their various brands to be providing consumers with in excess of 10 million quotes a day.
Alongside this, consumer expectations have shifted – if a price is not returned immediately, they will simply shop elsewhere. In addition to distribution and consumer changes, the demands of Pricing and Underwriting teams have continued to evolve at a pace with increasingly sophisticated and complex algorithms being derived to ensure fair and profitable pricing practices.
This coupled with the need for ‘real-time’ pricing updates to reflect market conditions and the ingestion of data from machine learning models means that the RTE of today is a very different beast to that of the past.
This is what Christopher Davies, Software Engineer from Acturis had to say:
Over our 20+ years working relationship with Polaris we have seen a huge shift in the requirements for rating products we support using Product Writer. Algorithms are increasing in size and complexity, and larger, niche
products once reserved for solely manual trading are now being e-traded. This, coupled with an increased demand for faster turnaround of changes, has meant ProductWriter has had to constantly evolve over time.
As new challenges arise, Polaris have been quick to adapt ProductWriter accordingly, from optimising the Run Time Environment to support larger risks, greatly improving the quote time to improve the user’s journey, to externalising rating tables, allowing quicker to market deployments, paving the way for self-service. Through their annual User Review Group process, Polaris works closely with their stakeholders, Acturis included, to take on feedback and suggestions to ensure the right changes are prioritised to keep ProductWriter aligned with market changes.
So how does this 25-year-old technology cope with the demands and needs of today’s high octane marketplace? Put simply – innovation and investment.
Polaris is a unique, industry owned organisation, whose board comprises of the UK’ s leading insurers. This gives us unparalleled insight into the dynamics of the marketplace and the technology needed to support it. Our user led development plan means our solutions are fine-tuned to meet the continuously evolving needs of the market.
Our vision and purpose has not wavered over the past 30 years – enabling Insurers, Brokers & MGA’ s to build, control and distribute insurance products in an efficient and effective, digital way.
Our continued insight and investment have resulted in some key deliveries to supercharge the RTE’s capabilities. Cloud computing opened the door for the RTE to be hosted in MS Azure, AWS and many others – this gives insurers the control to auto scale and cater for the peaks and troughs of traffic throughput.
More recently ProductWriter Accelerated Distribution (PAD) uses Robotic Process Automation (RPA) delivered through Kubernetes allowing the seamless and speedy deployment of insurance products to the marketplace ensuring our customers can capitalise on market trends and activity.
ProductWriter Driven Enrichment (PDE) provides sophisticated, rule-based call out functionality at point of quote to augment pricing and underwriting decisions by ingesting third party date sources, including outputs derived from machine learning models.
Fast, scalable, resilient and sophisticated are terms often used to describe the Run-Time Environment. These words are also the key drivers for Polaris’ customer base – that has not changed in the last quarter of a century, nor will it change in the next.
If you want to understand how we can help you rapidly deliver products to market please visit, www.polaris.co.uk/productwriter or send an email to [email protected]
