Our 2024 results: Strong industry wide usage and continued investment

We are pleased to share our results for 2024. Our product suite continued to be strengthened and widely used within the industry, ensuring that we remain core to our industry’s digital trading environment. Insurance premiums placed through our digital trading platform, imarket grew by 15% to £449 million.

Key highlights

ProductWriter

  • Released one of its biggest upgrades, with 60 improvements
  • 80 clients across Personal Lines and / or Commercial Lines
  • ProductWriter accelerated distribution launched
  • In 2023 & 2024 combined, 106 users underwent Polaris funded instructor-led training
  • Standards

  • Client count grew to 108
  • Electronic Trading Practice Groups (ETPGs) continued to be widely attended
  • imarket

  • Premium (GWP) saw 15% growth 2023 to £449m in 2024
  • Mini fleet saw GWP growth of 34% to £84.5m. Property Owners seeing GWP growth of 18% to £219.5m
  • Bravo digital trader connected to imarket as a new distribution platform
  • Live-Chat

  • Our fastest growing product; used 354,00 times, with over 500 insurer representatives chatting with nearly 17,000 individual brokers
  • Polaris

  • Celebrated our 30 year anniversary
  • Over 1,000 hours of industry input gained from our 30 advisory groups held during the year
  • Management View

    Our managing director, Vivek Banga comments:

    Polaris turned 30 in 2024. While the world of Digital and e-trading has changed beyond recognition, our mission to facilitate digital trading and make digital insurance placement as easy as possible remains as relevant as it was 30 years ago.

    We occupy a unique and privileged position as an industry owned company. Our shareholders are also our customers. It is the contribution and collaboration of our clients and industry stakeholders which drive our continued growth and their needs set our product development agenda.

    Our technology suite is in a strong position and our latest results show how widespread the usage of our technology remains within the industry. Rating and binding of ever more complex risks continues to grow and we are pleased with the momentum behind our entire product suite. We are very thankful to our industry for its fantastic support of us.

    ProductWriter

    We released one of our biggest upgrades to our widely used rating engine, ProductWriter. 60 improvements were delivered as part of this release. These include the launch of ProductWriter Accelerated Distribution, an automated pipeline that can deliver rating updates across multiple platforms in minutes. The number of ProductWriter clients remained at around 80, with license losses due to market exits balanced by adoption by new businesses. The use of ProductWriter to support Machine Learning based rating algorithms is also growing.

    ProductWriter Training & Development Programme

    In 2023 and 2024, our ProductWriter Training & Development programme saw 106 users representing 15 organisations undergoing Polaris funded instructor-led training. In 2024 learning pathways were added to the ProductWriter online Learning Area and by the end of 2024, 44 individuals from 17 organisations had completed at least one learning pathway.

    Standards

    Standards, our digital trading insurance industry language widely used to help industry trading partners build and distribute insurance products, grew to a client count of 108 with new licences more than offsetting those lost to market exits or consolidation.

    imarket

    Our digital trading platform, imarket, saw GWP growth of 15% to £449 million. The number of policies being traded grew by 3% to 546,449. Specifically, Mini Fleet where average premiums tend to be higher, saw a GWP growth of 34% to £84.5m and Property Owners, which makes up nearly half of the GWP in imarket grew by 18% to £219.5m. We enhanced imarket’s data and insight capability to support insurers in better focusing their product updates.

    We also supported the launch of Bravo Digital Trader onto imarket, the first new marketplace to go live in over 10 years and the fifth broker system to connect to imarket.

    Live-Chat

    Our Live-Chat service enabling brokers to digitally communicate digitally with insurers, recorded another year of rapid growth as more underwriters adopted the technology to answer queries from brokers, keeping more complex policies within e-trade systems and the discussions auditable. Live-Chat was used 354,00 times (2023: 297,000) with over 500 insurer representatives chatting with nearly 17,000 individual brokers across over 1,900 brokerages.

    Advisory Groups

    Our Electronic Trading Practice Groups (ETPGs) and other product advisory groups, which bring together insurers, brokers, software houses and trade bodies to address industry-wide issues continued to be very well attended, resulting in 30 such meetings during the year and over 1,000 hours of industry input.

    View our trade press coverage here:

    Insurance Edge: Polaris issues trading update: 15% rise in digital trades

    Insurance Times: Polaris reveals 449m in GWP trade through imarket in 2024

    Insurance Age: Polaris eyeing up 500m GWP million milestone for imarket in 2025