CIO Interview: Ian Penny, Group CIO, Hiscox

Hiscox insurance CIO discusses skills, automation and DevOps at his organisation

Ian Penny, group CIO at insurance firm Hiscox tells Computing about the major transformation programmes underway at his firm, in this video.

"The transformation programmes we're doing are quite profound. We're replatforming both our UK and US business, we're replacing all the financial systems, and we've just completed replacing the HR systems.

"So we're renovating the entire core systems capability of Hiscox.

"We're also looking at how we provide digital channels above that. We're using APIs, automation technology, and putting analytics in across the board.

"We, like many insurance firms, have some heritage systems which have been around for a little while, and looking at the growth ambitions of the firm, those systems are not going to be able to survive the doubling or trebling of policies and customers which we expect.

"So those ambitions are driving us to ask how we change the systems landscape. Also, how do I drive automation? How do I drive efficiency and new channels.

"The insurance market itself is also going through some fundamental changes. the way we interact with big broker communities is changing from being very paper-based to being much more API-based.

"In the UK we have some in-house written heritage systems, and we're adopting [cloud-based insurance software solution] Sapiens IDIT. We're about 75 per cent of the way through that.

"What we're seeing is a lot of efficiency in driving pricing. more than 90 per cent of policies now come through that system in an automated fashion, which frees up our underwriters to go and have high value conversations with clients."

Penny also said that his firm is replatforming to Microsoft Azure, in part because of his firm's long-standing relationship with the software giant.

Watch the video for more.