Saurabh Gupta — President, HFS Research[00:21]
All right, hi everyone, welcome to HFS Unfiltered. In today’s episode we’re diving into how the insurance industry is being reimagined with what we call the underwriters’ underwriter, Mosaic Insurance, and their partner in ambition, WNS. And joining me are two fantastic leaders driving this conversation: Krishnan, who’s the Chief Digital and AI Officer at Mosaic, and Selva, who’s the Chief Business Officer for BFSI at WNS. It’s fantastic, and it’s great to have you both with us. Welcome, gentlemen.
Selva Vaidiyanathan — Chief Business Officer – BFSI, WNS[00:53]
Thank you. Thank you. So exciting.
Saurabh Gupta — President, HFS Research[00:56]
So, Krishnan, let me ask you, Mosaic was founded with such a bold ambition. Tell us a little bit about what that ambition was and what was the gap in the industry that you were looking to fill.
Krishnan Ethirajan — Chief Digital & AI Officer, Mosaic Insurance[01:11]
Yeah, for us, it was a bit of unfinished business in the sense that we saw a significant gap in the way the traditional insurance markets, which are capital intensive, deploy capital. And you have a significant amount of capital and you’re writing unprofitable business because you have to deploy capital. And then you have on the other end of the spectrum a traditional MGA space, nimble, writing interesting and unique lines of business. However, they don’t have any skin in the game. In a sense, there are frailties on both. They’re looking for capacity and they’re looking for partners who can sort of give them the pen. We wanted to really create a model which was capital light, or what we call a hybrid insurer that deploys intelligent capital in a single geography that allows us to write business globally, but also have the nimbleness of an MGA where we’re able to write unique and interesting lines of business that are hard to underwrite with specialty expertise. But also what we wanted to do from the beginning is what we call eat our own cooking, where we assume a portion of the risk on our balance sheet. Our focus has been on writing what I would call highly specialized and technical lines, which have a high barrier to entry, as well as what we call non-model risk, what I would call highly specialized and technical in nature, and the expertise we built within the company is strong underwriting expertise around those lines of business.
Saurabh Gupta — President, HFS Research[02:56]
Oh, fantastic, Krishnan. And I loved eating your own cooking. I wish I could do that. In any case, Selva, you’ve been in this industry for so long and having watched it and played in it, starting something new like Mosaic is exciting, but at the same time fairly daunting. You know, from your perspective, what was the aha moment when you knew Krishnan and the Mosaic team were on to something different?
Selva Vaidiyanathan — Chief Business Officer – BFSI, WNS[03:29]
Well, look, I mean, first and foremost, I think the scale of ambition and the required innovation to bring that to life, as articulated by Krishnan here, but also his partners at Mosaic, at the leadership team, is second to none. I mean, we certainly have never seen a model as unique. Dare I say the London market in general, I don’t think has seen a business model that is as unique as what Krishnan just articulated. It has a syndicate at the very, a couple of syndicates at the very heart of the business model, surrounded by a distribution network of multiple geographies, specific areas of specialty. And the aha moment, that in itself was wow. But the aha moment, right, was for a partner that is so focused and so ambitious and in such a hurry to scale, they need a partner like ourselves; if not WNS, then who, right, who has experience straddling all aspects of the value stream in the specialty insurance market. We worked obviously at length, as you may be aware, Saurabh, with insurers, with brokers, with cover holders, with MGAs and so on and so forth. And the ability to have straddled that breadth of exposure and also the depth of domain that is needed sets us up to be a very unique partner for Mosaic. And, you know, Krishnan and I regularly meet and, you know, we are in great contact on a regular basis, essentially to take notes on how much progress we’ve made. And depending on the month or the quarter, there are actually more colleagues, or as many colleagues, at WNS serving Mosaic’s clients as there are in Mosaic serving Mosaic’s clients. And I think it is just that scale and pace with which we’ve been able to move. The quality and the breadth of operations on behalf of Mosaic’s clients has been pretty unique.
Saurabh Gupta — President, HFS Research[05:31]
Fantastic. So I think I’d like to get both your views on this. What’s the one technology or innovation that has had the biggest impact on you as you’ve scaled up over the last five years? And maybe I’ll start with you, Selva.
Selva Vaidiyanathan — Chief Business Officer – BFSI, WNS[05:50]
Look, before we get to the technology aspect, I just wanted to kind of build on what Krishnan said. This is a highly competitive market where Mosaic is trying to be truly innovative and unique. And as Krishnan indicated, there are a few other people that have tried to replicate it with less success than Mosaic has had, right? So what is needed before we come to technology is culture, right? And a lot of what Krishnan said resonates with me because I’ve seen it firsthand, not just within the four walls of Mosaic, but in the extended enterprise of Mosaic and WNS. From the get-go, for this business model for Mosaic to succeed, we had to be singularly focused on the culture that we set up between the two organizations to be trusting. When you have an end goal and where you need to get to, and that’s very clear, as Krishnan said, right, we need to be able to adapt and not be governed by commercial documents or rate cards or other contractual commitments that are very typical in this environment. Ours is not governed that way. Ours is governed in a very different manner. It is governed by that culture of trust, followed by expertise and capabilities that bring together not just the domain, but the digital and technology that you talk about. To me, there are many aspects of this. Look, I mean, our ability to trust each other and experiment with a risk data ingestion technology that will enable underwriters to make better decisions, not just better decisions, but better decisions in a faster manner. I think technology, this is the one I articulated, or our ability to jointly develop electronic ways of communicating with Mosaic’s brokers and the back and forth of data via portals versus the traditional way that is very common in the London market. These are all aspects of technology and other capabilities that come together, but fundamentally, they are underpinned by a culture of trust and a recognition that we need to continuously adapt. What you set up as a technological environment on day one will clearly not be what is needed on day 1000. Right. And I think both of us recognizing that has been very, very important in our partnership.
Krishnan Ethirajan — Chief Digital & AI Officer, Mosaic Insurance[08:21]
Yeah, Saurabh, just, I think I echo Selva’s comments, right? I think one of the taglines that we are proud of in our ethos is partnerships with a purpose. So we believe very strongly in having deep, strong partnerships, whether it’s on the operational and technology side or on our underwriting side. We believe we’re specialized underwriters, as you said, underwriters’ underwriter. And we believe that having strong, committed partners that understand your strategy and where you’re going and rowing in the same direction is essential for us, because we don’t want to be everything for the sake of being there. So from the start, we were focused on identifying and partnering with firms that can help us get to the journey and really are appreciative of where we want to go. Create a nimble underwriting entity that’s really focused on that and having a strategic direction and really partnering with like-minded firms like WNS to really help us get there.
To your question on single important technology, I mean, I would probably classify it on three fronts, right? For us, as I said, blank sheet of paper, we wanted to focus from an operational technology landscape on three pillars. One is operational efficiency. Two is underwriting from a risk selection standpoint and really driving underwriting productivity. And the third is being relevant and sticky to our SCM partners, or syndicated capital partners. So technology and data and our underlying operations are key to all of those, right? Operational efficiency driven by, I mean, we started off looking at getting standardized process and then applying automation on top of it so that we’re not starting from a legacy set of process and then spending the next five years trying to transform it. So let’s start having some level of standardization and then let’s start thinking of where can we apply changes to it and automating it, reduce the friction. On the underwriting side of the house in the front office, how can we be more relevant to the underwriters in terms of getting them more data, getting them more workflow, getting interesting risks that, again, applying some of the things that are available now as tools, whether it’s generative AI tools, machine learning algorithms, whether it’s ingesting documents, all those are, in my view, table stakes. Where we see the journey getting us is what we see as differentiating capabilities. To your point, we’ll use what I would call more targeted language models, not necessarily using the generative large language models, but really training interesting and unique data sets that we have been able to capture from the start. We want to capture everything. We want to have a data dump of every single piece of information that we can get our hands on, whether it’s relevant today or relevant in five years. So we can start building, taking existing models, but then starting to apply some level of specialization into them. The third piece is really being much more transparent and relevant to our SCM partners. Again, going back to my initial comment, our differentiation is how can we be more engaged with our capital partners? So what do they require? They require more access to data, more access to operational information, more access to information that can really give them a point-in-time view of what risk that Mosaic’s underwriting is impacting their portfolio. Again, whether we do it through sharing data, eventually currently providing that information directly into their portfolios, or eventually at some point getting to some level of what I would call a distributed ledger. So there’s real-time visibility. When we bind the risk, they see it on their platform and say, okay, this is what it impacts to my portfolio. This is why I need to get reinsurance, et cetera. So we want to see the entire journey and provide that visibility, rather than how the markets work today. Well, I’ve written a risk. A month later, I send you a bordereau and then I collect the cash and I settle it. It’s very yesterday. So we want to really build that foundation so that eventually that level of relationship and trust is there. And then eventually that helps us build long-term relationships with our partners and with folks like WNS who are helping us get there.
Saurabh Gupta — President, HFS Research[13:13]
So Selva, final question is, as you look forward to this fantastic sort of, as Krishnan mentioned, partners with a purpose, how do you think AI is going to reshape, or AI is going to be used in, Mosaic operations? And what’s the role that WNS plans to play in that journey?
Selva Vaidiyanathan — Chief Business Officer – BFSI, WNS[13:39]
Yeah, look, I mean, I think some of this we had covered, right? First and foremost, what’s the end goal? Krishnan and his team in Mosaic are focused on risk selection in a manner that is consistent and that’s optimal to their syndicate partners, right? I mean, it essentially comes down to that. And for them to be relevant to the market, they need to do that over and over again. And are we able to bring in agentic technologies? Are we able to bring in risk data ingestion, curation, and analytics capabilities that allow their underwriters to make those decisions in a consistent and an optimal manner is going to be a lot of what our focus is going to be. That’s one. And then are we able to enable these underwriters, our underwriting partners, to make those decisions in a better manner, but also in a faster manner, which kind of straddles that first pillar of operational efficiency? I think a lot of the ingestion data technology will make the firm at Mosaic, the business model at Mosaic, a lot more agile and faster in the market. Their speed in the market will be a lot higher. And we hope to be in the heart and center of that. And then when you go further into the value stream, are we able to use that data and present it in a manner that the underwriter is able to use that information and make data-led decisions versus gut-led decisions, are the two areas where I think we are first and most importantly focused on in the next several quarters here.
Krishnan Ethirajan — Chief Digital & AI Officer, Mosaic Insurance[15:19]
The problem, I think, most of our peers in the industry are struggling with is the lack of standardization, right, in terms of how do you apply agents to a dysfunctional set of process? And I think where we’ve been fortunate is really thinking through that early on so that as these technologies mature and they’re available, for us it becomes commodities to plug and play. Where we see differentiation is really taking it to the next level in terms of, let’s take that. That’s operational efficiency. On the risk selection side, it’s really applying additional data sets to be much more relevant. We want to write interesting and unique risks that are emerging. So we want to have that first-mover advantage. So all of the AI tools allow us to identify, source those risks, and then eventually support them. And that’s how we see deployment of AI tools in our business.
Saurabh Gupta — President, HFS Research[16:10]
Yeah. So Krishnan and Selva, you’re absolutely 100% right. We’ve been doing a lot of research on agentic AI adoption and nine out of 10 enterprises with their best intentions fail not because of technology, but because they have a huge amount of underlying process debt. They have a huge amount of underlying data debt. You know, the culture is not there to embrace technologies. And then they have technical debt. And I think it’s fascinating to hear your story where you’re already adaptive to those. You don’t have a huge amount of those kinds of enterprise debts.
Selva Vaidiyanathan — Chief Business Officer – BFSI, WNS[16:48]
I would certainly say, Saurabh, Mosaic, of all firms that we partner with, is the most future ready just because of all the reasons of the greenfield startup five years ago with the end in mind, right?
Saurabh Gupta — President, HFS Research[17:00]
Yeah. Now, gentlemen, thank you so much for taking out the time today. It was a fascinating conversation. I think far too often enterprises think too small. Here’s one enterprise which had a big, hairy, audacious goal and you managed to crack it. And it’s also great to see partners in ambition, you know, partnership with a purpose. I love that phrase. Krishnan, I’m going to steal that from you and use that more often. And congratulations to both of you for a very successful journey. And hopefully we’ll stay in touch.
Krishnan Ethirajan — Chief Digital & AI Officer, Mosaic Insurance[17:34]
Sounds great. Thank you. Thank you, gentlemen. Take care. Thanks. Thanks again.
