Background

Chaucer is a leading specialty (re)insurance group working with brokers, coverholders, and clients to protect and support business activities around the world. Chaucer is a leader in the reinsurance market, providing capacity across several risk classes, including having one of the largest Energy and Terrorism reinsurance books in the market.

Given the growth in Chaucer's portfolio and the size of its exposures, the (re)insurer needed a more efficient way to calculate and report on its reinsurance risk accumulation to inform underwriting decisions.

Chaucer selected Allphins' exposure management platform to reinvent its underwriting process, providing instant access to exposures in a clean, fast and manipulative platform, accessible to underwriters and exposure management teams.

Challenge

Exposure calculations are crucial to every reinsurer's process, ensuring that underwriting teams can make informed decisions and comply with capacity limits. For a (re)insurers of Chaucer's size, manual exposure calculations can be a long and painful process, often prone to errors and unable to support crucial decision-making timelines. For critical events like the January 1st renewals, the Chaucer team would often have to take an uncertainty buffer in their exposure estimations to accommodate the unfinished manual calculations.

"Prior to using Allphins, aggregate management across a large reinsurance portfolio such as ours was a challenge due to the manually intensive data entry that was required. We would therefore focus our time on reviewing only a select number of assets that we knew to drive peak exposures within our portfolio. If we had understood our live position across all assets during renewals we could have possibly taken a more dynamic approach to underwriting decisions, rather than being confined by a limited view of aggregation.”

Laurie Beard, Head of Marine Reinsurance, Chaucer Group

The Chaucer Energy Reinsurance underwriting team needed a tool to quickly and accurately give them clarity on their exposures, enhancing reporting, and enabling better underwriting decisions.

Solution

Developed with the specific needs of reinsurers in mind, the Allphins platform leverages cutting-edge technology like Natural Language Processing to analyze large exposure data, providing access to valuable exposure insights to support underwriting decisions and facilitate better interactions with brokers and reinsurance partners.

Using Allphins, the Chaucer Exposure Management team can easily upload even unstructured risk submission data, which is instantly cleaned and processed. Users can ask valuable questions on the platform using the search function and visualize their real-time exposure and capacity data. With minimal training, any team member, including junior underwriters and top managers, can access the platform with its user-friendly interface, promoting information circulation for reporting or decision-making.

"After reviewing alternative aggregation providers, we settled on Allphins because it offered us the most complete solution to our problem. The platform works with the wide variety of datasets provided to us by our clients and brings it all back to a simple aggregation tool in a user-friendly interface. As we were early adopters of the tool, the Allphins team were keen to get our feedback and have taken our insights to continue improving the tool, further aligning the output with our requirements."

Laurie Beard, Head of Marine Reinsurance, Chaucer Group

Results

Allphins enables the Chaucer Energy Reinsurance team to cut its processing time for exposure analysis to hours instead of days or weeks. The platform provides crucial insights at speed, enabling Chaucer underwriters to produce high-quality reports in real-time, collaborate better with partners, and make more profitable decisions.

“Previously, on the Energy side, we would typically aggregate to our top 50 exposures due to limitations of such a manually intensive task. Now, we can aggregate on a global all-risk basis, so all our assets are accounted for, and this takes us less time to calculate in Allphins than manually calculating our top 50.”

Laurie Beard, Head of Marine Reinsurance, Chaucer Group

With support from the Allphins team, the Chaucer Energy Reinsurance team successfully uploaded all its 2022 exposure data into Allphins, leveraging the insights for more confident capacity management in the 2023 renewal season. The solution also allows the team to produce accurate and exhaustive data, building trust with reinsurance partners. With a real-time view of all exposures, the Chaucer team is empowered to select the best policies and maximize profitability.

"One of the significant benefits of Allphins is how it has improved our relationship with our retrocession partners. We can now offer a more comprehensive illustration of our portfolio, outperforming any data sets we could share before, resulting in more efficient reinsurance solutions and generating a closer relationship between us and our stakeholders."

Laurie Beard, Head of Marine Reinsurance, Chaucer Group

Taking the Next Step With Terrorism Treaty

Following increased success with Allphins for Energy Reinsurance, the Chaucer team decided to also adopt Allphins to manage its Terrorism exposure. Terrorism is the most topical exposure within the insurance industry. Yet, it is the least understood by reinsurers because the data is either nonsensical from a reinsurance perspective or not provided in a legible format.

"With terrorism now a core offering to our clients, we need to ensure we are abreast of all exposures. Historically we have struggled to digest not only the different format of data submissions from clients but also the quantity of data sent to us - we would receive data packs with millions of geocodes across a variety of coverages. Allphins being able to offer us a solution to aid our analysis of this vast data will help ensure we continue to build a balanced and profitable portfolio."

Laurie Beard, Head of Marine Reinsurance, Chaucer Group

Now, with just a few clicks in Allphins, any member of the Chaucer Terrorism exposure management team can visualize and analyze their exposure in real-time, enabling efficient reporting and capacity management for the Chaucer terrorism portfolio.

Want to learn more? Book a demo with our team and discover how Allphins can help you gain clarity, accuracy, speed, and control over your risks and exposure.