The Big Ticket data platform will provide Specsavers with more confidence to retain risk within its captive, according to Lee Worth, head of group insurance at Specsavers.
Big Ticket launched its neutral digital infrastructure hub for corporate insurance customers at the Airmic Conference in Manchester, UK in June, after four years of development.
Guernsey captive owner Specsavers is the first client on the platform and Worth was part of the launch.
“Big Ticket will give us better data and it will give us the data in real time,” Worth told Captive Intelligence.
“It will allow us to do much more analysis and if we can then do that analysis ourselves or alongside our broker, it gives us a lot more confidence to retain that risk within the captive.
“One of the things we are looking to do is to start diversifying the captive, but we can’t diversify into other types of risk unless we’ve got confidence in the data being provided.”
Worth noted that Specsavers has historically always been quite reserved with it comes to the utilisation of its captive.
“We’ve always had a captive, but we’ve not necessarily used it to its full potential, and we’ve transferred a lot of our risk to the insurance market,” he added.
He said that property is currently the main focus of the Specsavers captive, but the captive also has some liability risk.
“In particular with Specsavers being a healthcare provider, we also have the need to write medical malpractice,” he said. “I’m keen to get more data from the industry so I can plan ahead and not be reactive.”
Rob Bartlett, co-founder and CEO at Big Ticket, said the platform allows brokers, insurers and captive managers to provide one version of the truth, “so we solve the problem around data capture and transmission during the renewal process”.
“Everyone is sharing the same data, they know where it came from, and they know the quality of it,” Bartlett added.
He believes that the Big Ticket platform provides a great opportunity for captive managers to improve the way they operate, if they consider some of the challenges of moving data between captives and reinsurers.
Bartlett noted that captives are an increasingly important part of the insurance ecosystem “and all the data benefits the insurer can get from Big Ticket is even more true for captives”.
“It might even be more important to the captive as it is part of the corporate and it’s their captive, and therefore, the accuracy and quality of that data is even more important,” he said.
Ken Fraser, co-founder and president at Big Ticket, highlighted that once companies are on the platform, it doesn’t necessarily just have to be used at renewal.
“One of the advantages is that captives can start thinking more strategically over the course of the year, so when it comes to the new renewal, the captive can be more aggressive if it wishes,” he said.
“Having a high confidence level in the exposure data puts the insured and their broker in a position where the captive can send a different message into the market essentially saying that the captive is very comfortable taking more risk if your rate goes too high.”
Big Ticket is backed by founding partner MasterCard and has a Global Advisory Board which includes members Aon, Aviva, Oasis, Zurich, Pool Re and Motive Partners.
Airmic CEO Julia Graham is chair of the Big Ticket Advisory Board.
“Big Ticket is the solution that the risk management community has been crying out for,” Graham said.
“Every year at the start of every insurance renewal, hundreds of thousands of companies use an industry-imposed process to collect exposure data.
“They are asked to use unencrypted spreadsheets and e-mail to do this; a painful, laborious and insecure process which takes up to nine months to complete at an annual recurring direct operational cost globally of US$25 billion, on top of which it actually increases vulnerability to data privacy and cyber security risks.”