Charlie Blackburn, Azur Technology & Graham Elliott, Crux Underwriting: Bringing two brains together: combining underwriting with tech (310)

InsTech - insurance & innovation with Matthew Grant

Crux Underwriting is a multi-line specialty underwriting business launched in early July by Graham Elliott. By combining underwriting with the tech arm of Azur Technology, founded by previous colleague Charlie Blackburn, we are witnessing the production of a 21st century MGA business.

One for the technology lovers and the MGA innovators. Tune in to hear Robin speak to Charlie and Graham about entrepreneurship in the MGA world, how technology can slot itself into an underwriting business and why the cultural aspect is the hardest thing to get right.

Key talking points:

• Journey from co-founding Azur Underwriting, to developing Azur Technology and Crux Underwriting
• Charlie’s experience forming long-term partnerships with MGAs as a separate technology provider
• Graham building out an agile insurance business in a regulated market
• The relationship between MGAs and capacity providers
• Why haven’t MGAs adopted modern and flexible platforms?
• Azur Technology: working on Salesforce
• What is it about technology that makes it currently exciting
• Petting-zoo sales: what has changed since starting a business in 2014

If you like what you're hearing, please leave us a review on whichever platform you use or contact Matthew Grant on LinkedIn.

To find out more about InsTech, our membership and offerings visit www.instech.co or contact us [e-mail]

Continuing Professional Development

This InsTech Podcast Episode is accredited by the Chartered Insurance Institute (CII). By listening, you can claim up to 0.5 hours towards your CPD scheme.

By the end of this podcast, you should be able to meet the following Learning Objectives:

• Describe why an agile approach to building out a business in a regulated market is an unusual but beneficial approach.
• Specify what problems MGAs have with modernising and utilising new technology solutions
• Identify why MGAs have difficulties with deploying technology across multiple classes.

If your organisation is a member of InsTech and you would like to receive a quarterly summary of the CPD hours you have earned, visit the Episode 310 page of the InsTech website or email [e-mail] to let us know you have listened to this podcast.

To help us measure the impact of the learning, we would be grateful if you would take a minute to complete a quick feedback survey.