XL : Catlin partners with Artificial Intelligence start-up Cytora

London, UKMon Oct 2, 2017-

XL Catlin's internal innovation team, Accelerate, today announced it is working with Cytora, a UK-based Insurtech start-up that uses artificial intelligence (AI) and open source data to improve the way insurers quantify, select and price risk.

XL Catlin will use Cytora's expertise in sourcing and analysing data from multiple sources and combining them to create new insights into risk. Cytora's Risk Engine captures the online footprint of risks clients are continuously facing by crawling data from company websites, news articles and government datasets, and processes it using AI algorithms in order to predict future claims, attractive risk profiles and quality of risks.

These insights will help actuaries at portfolio level to identify new profitable segments, help underwriters to improve risk selection and provide tailored risk solutions for clients.

Vincent Branch, Chief Executive of Accelerate, explains the partnership: 'We are experimenting with a wide range of cutting-edge technologies to explore what is possible. But we cannot do it alone. We need to partner with like-minded start-ups like Cytora that can help us embed those new technologies to transform our product design, pricing, underwriting, claims and risk engineering capabilities to the benefit of our clients and brokers.'

He added: 'We are excited to be working with Cytora, a company that has, in just three years, built such an excellent reputation around its ability to use artificial intelligence and machine learning to help drive better business decisions.'

Richard Hartley, Chief Executive Officer and co-founder of Cytora said: 'Cytora is transforming the way insurers select and price risk using artificial intelligence and open source data. We are enabling insurers to differentiate between risks at a higher level of granularity than ever before, and discover new profitable segments in areas where they have limited underwriting experience.

'We believe this is the future of insurance and we are delighted to partner with a forward thinking, innovative company like XL Catlin who not only shares our vision but is also investing in realising major gains through the use of external data.'

XL Catlin established its Accelerate team in November 2016, to leverage commercial opportunities arising from new technologies and to drive transformational innovation by working closely with the business. This partnership with Cytora follows the appointment of Ashish Umre as Accelerate Partner, Artificial Intelligence.