Our 2023 Results: strong investment and growth, widespread usage

We are pleased to share our results for 2023. Backed by a £1.5m investment in imarket and over £1m investment in ProductWriter, we ended the year with our product suite at its strongest ever, being widely used across the industry and remaining core to digital trading within the industry.

ProductWriter

We invested over £1 million to enhance ProductWriter, our market-leading rating engine, which is an essential tool for 80 clients in providing technical premiums, terms, and endorsements for risks, which can then be digitally traded or used by specialist underwriters.

As the digital rating environment continues to evolve, with insurers embracing machine learning-based algorithms and expanding digital rating to more complex products and risks, ProductWriter remains at the forefront of such developments.

In 2023, we implemented 50 enhancements to ProductWriter, including additional support for machine learning algorithms utilised by underwriters for faster pricing optimisation, new workflow tools, and enhanced support for pricing model imports.

Moreover, we expanded ProductWriter’s capabilities to better support rating for large risks, such as complex fleet, property portfolios, and marine risks, in response to increasing demand from insurers.

Looking ahead to 2024, we will be rolling out additional enhancements to further improve the speed at which new pricing changes and products can be deployed to the market.

imarket

imarket, our flagship digital trading platform, completed a £1.5 million upgrade in November last year, future-proofing its infrastructure and supporting its growth for the next decade of digital trading. A significant proportion of the platform was recoded and moved to scalable cloud technology.

In 2023, insurance premiums placed through imarket increased by 21% to £394 million – this growth trajectory is a testament to our continuous investment in upgrading our product suite to meet the evolving needs of brokers and insurers in the digital trading landscape. The number of policies placed through the trading platform placed through the platform increased by 6.2% in the past year, from 497,883 to 528,711, breaking the half a million barrier.

Standards

Standards, our digital trading insurance industry language widely used to help industry trading partners build and distribute insurance products, maintained a client count of 105. Nine new licences were issued, balancing out the effect of market exits and industry consolidation.

Live-Chat

The volume of our Live-Chat service, enabling brokers to communicate digitally with insurers, increased by 25% to 296,821 chats compared to 237,105 in 2022. This increase reflects insurers’ growing reliance on the platform for communicating with brokers regarding complex risks within a secure and auditable environment.

Management View

Our Managing Director, Vivek Banga comments: “As an industry owned organisation, we are pleased to see the pivotal and widespread role Polaris plays to facilitate digital insurance trading across the industry. The uptick in overall GWP highlights just how essential digital trading is for the insurance ecosystem, while the growing use of ProductWriter demonstrates how digital tools are developing to support the underwriting of risks of increasing complexity and rating sophistication. Our product suite is the strongest it has ever been. We will continue to invest in new ways to connect risks with capital through fast, effective trading and innovative technology.”

“We’ve seen a significant uptake in Live-Chat from our insurers over the last year and they’re increasingly seeing the benefits of being able to document the conversations between broker and insurer. This means underwriters can focus on what they do best rather than spending time answering frequently asked questions. The MI [management information] clients gain from Live-Chat also assists them in staffing their teams to make the right people available.”

“We pledge to continue to significantly invest in our products to keep evolving them in line with the extensive feedback that we receive from the market. Our mission remains the same, to support digital trading within the industry. Huge thanks to our Board and our industry supporters – who spent over 1,000 hours across our product forums – for ensuring we can continue to do so.”

To read our press coverage, click on the links below:

Polaris publishes 2023 usage figures

Banga commits to more polaris developments as insurers push the boundaries on digital trading

imarket premiums surge to £384m in 2023

Polaris notes 21% uptick in Premium Business