Andy Moss, GM Underwriting: Duck Creek: Why AI in underwriting needs to run ‘on rails’: Send’s next chapter with Duck Creek (416)

Speaker A: Foreign.

Speaker B: Great to have you back on again. You are CEO of Send. You were founded back in 2017 and most recently acquired by US systems provider Duck Creek. And we had you on the podcast in June 2023. So clearly for lots of reasons, lots to catch up on. Welcome back. Great to have you.

Speaker A: Great to see you, Matthew. Thank you for inviting me back. And, um, timing seems it was fortuitous with what's happened as well, because we've got more to talk about than we would have otherwise.

Speaker B: And, yeah, lots of fortuitous things as well. I mean, you're only a few weeks in since the acquisition was announced. How are you feeling? Has the kind of reality kicked in yet?

Speaker A: It's sinking in, in waves, I'd say. So I'm now actually general manager for underwriting, working for the CEO, uh, of Duck Creek. So not CEO, uh, of Send anymore. And that's a hard one to give up in introductions. I keep slipp my previous job title, but I'm excited. It's been a really challenging year. The acquisition obviously generates huge amount of effort, uh, for both teams. The company acquiring and Send, that's been acquired. So pleased to be through that, actually, and relieved to be through it and excited about what happens next, really.

Speaker B: Yeah. And I wouldn't be too worried about losing the CEO title. I mean, everyone can call themselves CEO these days, but not everyone can sell their, uh, company, which I'm sure was very successful. We'll talk a little bit more about the. But first of all, Duck Creek themselves, unusual name. So quite a few people may be familiar with the name but less familiar with the company. And I believe They've got over 300 clients in the US but can you just talk a little bit more about who they are and what they do?

Speaker A: So Duck Creek is an insurance technology provider, uh, based in the US they have over 370 customers globally. And what that means is they're working with some of the biggest players in the industry, and that includes international implementations across their core offerings. So policy, billing, claims, a number of other products that they've built to complete the suite. So 25 years plus doing PNC at scale. That's their business for you and the team.

Speaker B: And we've known you for quite a long time, and thanks for your support. Obviously, these things are always confidential until they happen. But were you actually out there actively looking for a buyer or was this somewhat opportunistic?

Speaker A: We were actually out there raising capital to grow, so we were raising a growth round, getting institutional investor to, uh, put money in and so that we can expand products, you know, go further, spend or go to market. What happened, what transpired? As we were having some of those conversations earlier in the year, Duck Creek popped up on LinkedIn saying, Andy, do you want to chat? And that was the beginning of the discussions. And then a bit of a whirlwind. I think it was around 120 days from that approach to closing the deal a few weeks back.

Speaker B: It actually strikes me as quite a clever strategy. I'm sure as you said, you were out there looking for funding, but as a way of flushing out on the market if there are any people interested in an acquisition, because obviously it's a disclose you want to go out and be acquired, you're into a whole different game. If you just say you're looking for capital, then people are going to find you anyway. I'm glad that looked out so well. We'll come back to talk a bit more about what it means at Duck Creek in a minute. But just to start off with sen, can you describe the SEN client profile as it is today? Sort of pre Duck Creek.

Speaker A: So 21 customers. We obviously grew out of London market, you know that well. Um, but we expanded into North America as well. So our customer base is reinsurers, insurers, MGA, MGUs. We've got customers obviously in London, but in the US in Mexico and Canada as well. So a growing base of customers that do quite different business actually, but do uh, it in their own unique ways.

Speaker B: It's a really good success story. And you've also, I guess you're one of the early companies that even coined this phrase. But you talked about an underwriting workbench. You're certainly the first person I heard talking about it. And you've now shifted or you've expanded, I should say into this term, um, orchestration or orchestration engine. Can you just explain what it means to move from an underwriting workbench to an orchestration engine?

Speaker A: The term underwriting workbench has so many different meanings for people, but for us it was about bringing everything into one place. So these underwriters in our customer base, they are sat at their desk using four or five different applications. They're handing stuff off to different teams. So bringing all of that work, the data capture, the processing, the integrations all into one place was really important. But then what we've seen and there's a convergence in the industry, so there are a number of players. I say that adjacent to send or overlapping with what send does everyone seem to be converging on orchestration engine, why that's important is really about the enablement of AI. That's the key thing for me. Most m successful AI projects in enterprise are uh, based on AI running on Rails, not just some, um, random app that someone's vibe coded and managed to see stand up in a production environment. You need the infrastructure, you need the governance around it, you need a whole load of things and that's what the orchestration engine brings. So everything we had before, but really a focus on enabling the end to end journey and also the variety of different business flows that our customers have, that's just diversifying evermore each year that passes.

Speaker B: Yeah, I mean it's the kind of strategy that makes complete sense when you look backwards. But of course, when you started off, we're talking about underwriting workbench, the idea of generative AI, large language models most people weren't aware of. That means, as you said, the timing has actually worked out really well with that shift to orchestration. People were trying to do orchestration, but it was really hard to do that before you started to move into the world of generative AI, I'm assuming.

Speaker A: Absolutely. The industry is looking at things in such a different way now as well than maybe a few years ago in terms of having agents running tasks autonomously in place of what would have been teams of people previously, and that all needing to be choreographed on one platform. That's the difference we're seeing. And many insurers in the industry are, uh, looking to deploy agents into their workflows and that's, uh, hard to do. There's a lot of POCs, a lot of vibe coding going on, but not much stuff that sticks in production.

Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, I guess that's my second half of the brilliance of your strategy, which is you said this, but it's just worth repeating for a company to try to just start off from scratch and build an AI tool and use Claude code to vibe code it. You'd have an application, but it wouldn't have anywhere to sit, it wouldn't have any controls around it. You basically hit that at the right time with your underwriting workstation to then move into the orchestration and with the AI tool. But I do want to ask you about the tagline. So I read the tagline from the sale announcement. I thought it was quite punchy. And you've hinted this a little bit, but just maybe to unpack this a little bit. So the combined venture was described as creating the industry's only agentic underwriting to core Platform. Can you explain a little bit more about what's behind those words?

Speaker A: Yeah, it's certainly punchy, intentionally punchy, I'd say. But what this is about is you've got a number of players in the industry. So you've got a bunch of policy administration, core technology providers, massive customer base and up until now I don't think any of them have a really strong underwriting or orchestration engine story. And you've got a bunch of players like Send and companies, as I said, that are adjacent to Send. Maybe they've come from pricing or AI for underwriting and some of those are now starting to go towards orchestration engine. Some of them are now playing into the core system space. Uh, but core systems are really hard to get right. But underwriting is also quite hard to get right. So what you've got with this agentic underwriting um, to core platform is the deep knowledge around the industry and um, what core systems need to do for that. With what we've done at send, which is we spent best part of a decade building out for underwriting. So bringing those two things together we think is an industry first to have best of breed in the same place.

Speaker B: And for your clients, existing clients, now you've got access to Duck Creek and notwithstanding it's only a few weeks in assume, will they be able to start getting the benefit of the Duck Creek technology again combined with what they're already doing with you in your SEND technology?

Speaker A: A lot of the customers are already asking what's coming next. That's the big question that everyone has. I think we will be taking more AI to our customers. Duckcrete's assembled a really fantastic team over the last year or so of AI expertise on top of what is an established scale platform for core systems. We're going to leverage that, um, and bring that to our customers. But also we're going to bring a really strong integration story in terms of SEND as an underwriting core with policy administration and billing on the Duck side. It doesn't mean that we won't sell our platform standalone. That's always going to be a thing. Most of our customers are not Duck Creek customers in terms of Send, but we're going to have a really strong integration story. So the definition of what an insurance product is that sits in Duck, uh, policy today is going to be able to synchronize into send, which is going to really lower implementation cost and um, drive a lot of value for our customers. That's the plan.

Speaker B: And on the flip side, so from Duck Creek Themselves, they clearly are benefiting in that area where they can sell some technology into your clients. But what about for their existing clients we touched on earlier? They're not that active in the London market. But can you talk a little bit about what Duck Creek looks to get out of this over and beyond your current market space?

Speaker A: I think Duck Creek were interested in send not just because of the orchestration engine for underwriting, but also because of our London market knowledge. And um, it's a core platform that's not hugely deployed in the uk, certainly not London market. And they wanted a base of expertise to help expand into that space. For the existing Duck Creek customers, we're already starting to talk to them. So we're getting in front of people showing them send technology, helping them understand how that can work with their existing systems with the Duck Creek products they already use. I think there's a lot of excitement around it. There's a lot of interest and my diary keeps filling up with demos and discussions with existing Duck Creek customers. There's almost been this pent up demand for getting something in the underwriting space. So all of the insurers out there will be looking to their core systems providers saying, when are you going to fix this problem? When are you going to have something in that space? So yeah, pushing on an open door with some of these decisions, discussions as well, which is exciting times.

Speaker C: Underwriting is entering the AI age, but are insurers ready to orchestrate it? A new report from Instec and Send explains how underwriting orchestration engines connect data, workflows, pricing tools and AI in one governed environment. Discover why workbenches alone are, uh, no longer enough, how early adopters are cutting processing times and how to build a practical investment case. Read Underwriting Orchestration Engines, Equipping Insurers for the AI Age on instec's website for free.

Speaker B: Yeah, well, it's fantastic. And then we were delighted to work with you on a report recently talking about orchestration written by real people, actually not written by AI. And is there anything in that that struck you as particularly impactful? We'll put a link in the episode notes. People can download it from your website. Our website. But is there anything that struck you in that report that's just worth talking about?

Speaker A: I thought two things and what I've kind of covered already, which was you need to run, um, enterprise AI on Rails. So that uh, transition to uh, orchestration engine, I think. Why is that important now? Uh, it's the platform on which you achieve success with AI as business. I Think the other thing I found really interesting, and I think it's such a good topic of discussion, is the workforce in transition. So you've got this change going on where, uh, in underwriting, nothing gets simpler view, there's more complexity, more data, uh, more distribution channels. Everything just seems to get harder. Right? And meanwhile, you've got this brain drain occurring where I can't remember the percentage. A substantial proportion of the underwriting workforce is set to retire in the next 15 years. You've got this dynamic where, uh, AI is changing everything. You've got all of the knowledge on which everything is based in a lot of people's heads about to go out the door. And there's a kind of existential challenge for these insurers on so many fronts. And I think for me, getting good at AI, quickly, leveraging tech so that you've kind of codified how you get stuff done in your business onto a platform. Rather than relying on someone's mental checklist and knowing that they've got to send something to this other person if something particular happens, getting that codified onto a technology platform is a really powerful way of, you know, making sure you don't lose that knowledge around how things get done. And, um, that's what we're seeing with customers. They are universally wanting to deploy their whole portfolio onto send because it means they get everything done in the same way. And everyone will say, well, we work differently in this underwriting team to this other underwriting team, and they've all got common things that they have to do. They've all got to file a report for finance or do a sanctions check or, you know, there's a lot of activities that I, uh, describe as cross cutting. So, yeah, for me, it was that piece around the workforce transition. That was the thing that stood out.

Speaker B: You just gave me a great idea for a vocal history of the underwriter. You know, you get these people that do sort of vocal histories of disappearing trades or people who saw military service. You could do one for underwriters. We record what they're saying and then you extract it using AI. I'm not quite sure how many would be willing to share that, but I did have a question actually for you on that changing workforce. So one of the things I've heard talking to people now, insurers have sort of, as you've implied by what you've been saying, have shifted from skepticism about the power of AI and what it can do to now looking to their own teams to say, well, should we build versus buy? Because now With AI out there and Claude code and all these other tools, you can do more. But what are you sort of seeing in that space? And maybe any advice to anybody at an insurance company who's listening, who sort of wants to understand how far do you go with your own team as to what they can build versus at what point do you need to bring in an orchestration engine? Because there's only so far you can go.

Speaker A: We would say this as a software vendor, uh, but I do believe it as well, which is buy the commodity and build the differentiators. Where we see really interesting things going on in our customer base. It's where they're doing that internal build, but they're doing something really unique. They're doing something that is a true differentiator. They're using data in a certain way, they're automating a part of the process in a unique way. That's where the value is for me. I don't think everyone, all the insurers are about to start building their own core systems because there's an overwhelming demand for building more stuff. There's software engineering roles, there's never been more of them on the market for hiring and there's this demand, but AIs just reduced the cost of doing software development. But I'd say do something that's really useful and unique with it, rather than thinking you can do. No one's going to go and build their own version of Office365, are they? You've got to draw a line somewhere. But as software vendors, we've got to keep up with that. Keep, uh, ensuring we're bringing the value, but also that we're enabling our customers to build those differentiators and, um, deploy them on the platform.

Speaker B: Yeah, and uniqueness plays back to London's role to be the insurer of last resort. Or the insurers where things are so complex or excess and surplus, where many of the best underwriters would have done their actuaries, would be using spreadsheets, do their analysis. No clients. Well, they've got the tools, but it's just different tools, as you say, to sort of be unique and niche and then just sort of switching a little bit now to the sort of founder, uh, role. Big question for you. If there's one bit of advice you would give to yourself, looking back on this process, therefore, you can give to other people about what has either helped you be successful in this sale or something you might have done differently, what would be your advice to somebody else looking to sell a business at some point, something you really have to get right.

Speaker A: I'm going to say something that's more around building the business so you build something valuable. But I think the thing that's been remarkable for me is having a bunch of people around me who are somewhat, uh, aligned. Not completely aligned, but somewhat aligned in how I see the world, what matters to me. And that was important right from the outset for me and my co founders, Matt and Ben, that we'd have people that would wanted to get things done, wanted to do the right thing, but were ambitious and wanted to build a business as well. So you can find people with really strong functional skills. You can go and test people for programming languages or whether they can do particular finance tasks, but you can't compel people or easily test for people who actually care about what you're doing. That's hard to find. But probably a really key thing for us was assembling a team full of people that actually think things matter for our customers.

Speaker B: Yeah. And actually if I can add something as well, just as you're talking about that, uh, one of the areas I feel you've been very successful in is seeing marketing as a strategic role within the company and Sarah joining you and someone who really understands the technology, frankly. We talked to lots of companies, but someone who actually knows what's going to support the business and the company is just incredibly valuable. I would just definitely call that out to anybody looking for advice on who to bring into the team. And we're going to come back to business in a moment. But just on the advice one, I always intrigued whether people have got a book or a podcast, particularly as we're kind of into the holiday season. For somebody who can recommend something to read or listen to, that has been useful for you.

Speaker A: There are two things I'd say that, uh, if I'm honest that my go tos for podcasts. One is nerdy work stuff, uh, which is Invest like the Best by Patrick o', Shaughnessy, which is about how investors see the world and investment opportunities. But it goes deep. And um, there's lots of interesting storytelling and success stories and failures. I like that. But I would perhaps a bit more basic Desert island discs. I just, I always go back to it and there's such a rich archive of going back decades. And um, yeah, what I like about it is that uh, it gives you people being. I can kind of put into a sort of situation where they're, they're channeling a memory, all right. And they're talking about something and it Catches people off guard and it's lovely. So those are my two brilliant.

Speaker B: Well, I haven't heard of Invest like the Best and then Desert Island Discs. I noticed actually Christopher Nolan is on that recently. So those are anybody who's seen the Odyssey recently and wants to understand what's going on in Christopher Nolan's brain or what music he likes. I guess that's more Desert Island Discs. Definitely recommend that now. Dandy. Those are two good ones for the holiday season as well. And then finally, for people who want to know more about Send and Duck Creek, what's the sort of quickest way to get them connected with you or your colleagues?

Speaker A: Well, you can always reach out to me on LinkedIn and, um, check out our website, our LinkedIn pages as well. We're approachable bunch, so please just say hello if you want to find out more.

Speaker B: Well, they are, because I asked somebody once at one of the dinners we did with you had, you know, send, and they said, I listened to the podcast and now I'm a customer. So.

Speaker A: Yeah, so I know who you're talking about as well.

Speaker B: Hopefully it's for the customer.

Speaker A: Yes.

Speaker B: Andy, you've got a lot going on with absorbing the new owners and, uh, contacting them. Final question for you, actually, having worked for Americans for a long time, where are Duck Creek based?

Speaker A: What part of the US they were remote first. The head office is in Boston, but they're quite spread out, actually, across different states, so.

Speaker B: So good move. First of all, getting an East Coast US company to work with just because of the time difference. And my, uh, experience with working with Americans was you do kind of need to remind them that work stops in the UK at about 6 o', clock, so please arrange for the team. Anyway, I'm sure you're very diligent, but, you know, please don't arrange calls after one o' clock east coast time.

Speaker A: So, yeah, it's as though you've seen my diary. But no, things are settling down now. Uh, so get it right.

Speaker B: Get it right early, because then they learn. Anyway, Andy, it's been a pleasure to talk to you. Congratulations. I'm really pleased to see the news. Thanks for sharing that with us early as well and hope to see you in person soon.

Speaker A: Yeah, thanks, Matthew.

Speaker C: Well, if you've made it this far, then I'm pretty sure you found that as interesting as I did. The Instec podcast comes out every Sunday morning where we spotlight the latest news, leading voices and freshest updates across insurance that you need to know about. If you would like to take part in these conversations. Head to www.instech.co to find out how you can join our network and, um, be a part of the insurance intelligence for the cur.