OAK Global entered the reinsurance market with a clear purpose: underwrite a resilient future by capturing opportunities in constantly evolving risk landscapes. The company built its foundation around four critical risk pillars - climate and environmental, geopolitical, technological, and economic - each demanding sophisticated data analysis capabilities.

"We placed a huge amount of emphasis on having best-in-class technology from the outset," explains Conrad Williams, OAK Global’s Director of Underwriting for specialty lines. "The idea was to help empower the underwriters to make more informed decisions and contribute to the outperformance of OAK Global as an underwriting entity and provide true differentiation to our clients."

This technology-first approach is manifested in OCEAN, OAK Global’s proprietary data and analytics platform. Standing for OAK Capital Exposure and Analytics Network, OCEAN combines in-house intellectual property with carefully selected third-party partnerships to create a comprehensive underwriting ecosystem.

The Strategic Partnership Model: Build vs. Buy in Action

For a startup reinsurer, time represents the most valuable resource. OAK Global’s leadership recognised that building every capability internally would consume precious months that could be better invested in client relationships and market development.

"We have the knowledge and expertise to build something similar to what Allphins does, but it would take us far too long," Williams notes. "Given there's already a really good platform out there in the market, the trade-off between investing the time ourselves versus partnering was easy to make."

External partnerships provide ongoing benefits beyond immediate development costs:

• Continuous improvement through feedback from multiple users
• Version control and upgrades managed by dedicated teams
• Scalable API integrations that embed within OCEAN
• Reduced operational overhead for system maintenance

"That's one of the perks of being a startup - we don't have any legacy tech, so we can build things from the get-go the way that we want to," Williams observes.

Solving the Onshore Energy Challenge: From Data Desert to Decision Engine

Onshore energy presents a complex underwriting challenge. The market has experienced sporadic performance over recent years, with significant losses from individual risk losses - explosions at refineries, fires at petrochemical plants - rather than traditional natural catastrophe driven events.

The fundamental problem? Identifying peak asset exposures across portfolios.

"Cedents provide full lists of all their assets in Offshore energy - limits and coverages, the lat-longs, construction type," Williams explains. "But in Onshore energy, there's a hesitancy from cedents to provide asset information. You may only get the top 20 assets that they insure."

Without comprehensive asset data, carriers struggled to identify portfolio concentrations, calculate accurate peak exposures, and clash exposures across multiple cedents.

The Technical Solution: Anonymous Data into Actionable Intelligence

Allphins solved this challenge through a combination of proprietary database development and sophisticated matching algorithms. The platform maintains a comprehensive database of global industrial complexes, built through extensive data harvesting.

The breakthrough came in connecting anonymous exposure data modules (EDMs) from Moody’s with real-world asset identification.

"Allphins draw circles around their Onshore energy assets in their database, and if an EDM location pings via a lat-long in that circle, we get a reasonably good degree of confidence that the location in the EDM is that asset," Williams describes. "By doing that, we can get a good approximation of all of the assets that we are reinsuring in their portfolio."

This process enables portfolio roll-up across treaty terms, clash analysis across the entire book, and peak exposure identification for individual assets.

Pre-Bind Integration: From Submission to Decision in Real Time

OAK Global embedded Allphins directly into its underwriting workflow, making exposure analysis standard for every pre-bind evaluation. When brokers submit new business, the team immediately loads exposure data to assess marginal impact.

"We can interrogate the submission: Does it add to my peak exposure? Does it add to my top 50? How diversifying is it across the top 100, top 1,000?" Williams explains.

This proved particularly valuable for OAK Global’s strategic focus on geographical diversification. The company actively seeks business in Asia-Pacific and Middle East markets to balance out the typical US exposure concentration.

"When we get an exposure file from those cedents outside of the US, we can load it in and see there aren't actually any material exposures in the US and quantitatively prove the diversification with confidence," Williams notes. "That gives us confidence to set our line size appropriately. Maybe we can offer more capacity than we initially thought, because the portfolio is very diversified."

Quantifying the Impact: Growth Without Proportional Risk

The platform's analytical capabilities enabled OAK Global to demonstrate sophisticated risk management during their outwards reinsurance renewal. The company planned significant growth in their Onshore energy portfolio income - growth that initially drew questions from reinsurers.

"We were able to demonstrate with real data that the book we underwrote significantly increased our income while increasing our peak assets by a fraction of the premium growth," Williams reveals. "That really speaks to that element of diversification that we have in the book by writing ex-US regional business."

This data-driven approach provided capital efficiency through reduced reinsurance costs, investor confidence through transparent risk management, and competitive advantage in pricing.

Building Stakeholder Confidence

The platform's impact extends beyond operations into stakeholder management. OAK Global regularly demonstrates Allphins’ capabilities to capital providers through live dashboards and real-time analysis.

"We've taken our key capital providers through Allphins, pulled up the dashboard, showed them some live maps, given them examples of when a large loss occurs," Williams explains. "That all looks very impressive, it's seamless, it's instant, and inspires confidence that they've given their capital to an underwriting shop that is really on top of their exposures."

The Service Dimension: Technology Plus Partnership

The technical capabilities alone don't explain OAK Global’s enthusiasm. The service dimension - responsiveness, customisation, and continuous improvement - creates additional value.

"We have weekly catch-ups, they're always a phone call or an email away if there's issues," Williams notes. "They've been incredibly accommodating with custom analysis requests and making improvements to their tool."

This collaborative approach drives mutual innovation while OAK Global receives tailored solutions and rapid issue resolution.

Cultural Integration: Company-Wide Adoption

Technology adoption can face internal resistance, but OAK Global achieved unanimous adoption across the organisation - from junior analysts through C-suite executives.

"I've been the internal champion of Allphins, so now my colleagues just laugh when I bring it up because they know I'm going to speak endlessly about how much value we’re gaining from using Allphins," Williams admits. "But what it really speaks to is the alignment in terms of what we're trying to do as an underwriting shop."

The platform aligned perfectly with OAK Global’s vision of becoming a tech-enabled underwriter of the future.

Operational Efficiency: Speed as Competitive Advantage

Beyond risk analysis, the platform addresses a critical operational challenge: portfolio analysis speed.

"In historic jobs, I've seen how long it takes to do a portfolio roll-up across Terror EDMs," Williams reflects. "You have to ask exposure management to import data, double-check treaty terms, run it, create custom scripts - it can take time to complete and doesn’t provide the instant, pre-bind information we need to make underwriting decisions."

Allphins provides near-instantaneous analysis capabilities, enabling real-time decision-making during negotiations and rapid portfolio assessment for new opportunities. This operational efficiency creates competitive advantage where timing often determines deal success.

Scaling for the Future

OAK Global’s vision is to be a globally leading risk partner, moving beyond follow positions to quote and lead complex risks, and to provide long term partnerships to clients.

"Allphins will scale with us as we go on that journey," Williams confirms. "I’m sure the platform and tool will continue to grow with us as our portfolio grows, and we are happy to partner with other innovative small businesses. [RV3] In time we will use the data and insights from Allphins to start quoting and leading business as we broaden our partnerships with our clients and add value to the reinsurance market."

Market Challenges and Technology Solutions

The specialty reinsurance market faces structural challenges, particularly talent shortages where demand outpaces supply.

"There's more jobs than there are people, and that's been an issue for a number of years," Williams observes. "It's been quite important at OAK Global to differentiate the proposition that we have and thus attract the best talent."

Technology platforms contribute to talent attraction through enhanced job satisfaction via sophisticated analytical tools and competitive differentiation in recruitment.

The Path Forward

OAK Global’s experience demonstrates how reinsurers can harness technology partnerships to overcome traditional market limitations. By combining proprietary platform development with strategic external relationships, the company created analytical capabilities that enable confident decision-making in complex risk environments.

As Williams concludes, "We view it as a long-term partnership that we want to sustain and nurture going forward."

The partnership represents more than technology implementation - it exemplifies a new model for insurance industry innovation, offering a blueprint for leveraging technology partnerships to accelerate growth and build competitive advantage in an increasingly complex risk landscape.

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