Farmsure and INSTANDA in Partnership: Transforming Agricultural Insurance

As a cutting-edge core insurance platform provider, INSTANDA's technology partnership with Farmsure has helped the company increase its capacity for underwriting new business enquiries in relaunching its complex Farm Combined platform.

In this case study, we interview Farmsure CEO Andrew Bell and MD Mark Benger and discuss how the success of this partnership ensures prosperity in an industry experience vast changes in upcoming years.

Farm insurance customer expectations are shifting to a digital-first approach

Mark starts the interview by explaining that we're entering a new digital era now, and insurers must keep up with consumer demand.

"I recognize that going forward over the next five years, we're going to have a generation coming through that expects to be able to do things on a phone, tablet, or laptop. They're not sending written presentations in and then waiting the traditional, considerable amount of time for a response," he said.

This poses a considerable challenge for insurance providers reliant on legacy technology. Mark explains that gathering policy information can be difficult for those seeking complex coverage, such as farmers and agricultural businesses. Farmsure needed a personalized, tailored system to support an experienced underwriting team servicing complex risks.

Policies need to be flexible enough to support a wide variety of farming equipment, buildings, and contents. Additional context can be helpful to underwriters, such as livestock disease outbreaks in farms and neighboring areas or other information about risk factors impacting policy premium.

With a digital-first approach, underwriters can access a wealth of third-party data resources to accurately assess risk. These third-party data resources can enable customers to submit applications with less time spent gathering all of the information up-front.

Platforms like INSTANDA are designed to lead brokers through the new business cycle intuitively, asking relevant questions to assess risk and automatically adding endorsements where necessary while still providing space for a risk to be underwritten on a bespoke basis. As a result, the application process is streamlined for all parties.

Andrew comments, "From INSTANDA, I was looking for significant operational efficiencies as well as enhanced data capabilities to better aid underwriting decision-making around pricing, performance and risk selection. What I like about INSTANDA is the ability to link with third-party data, providing us with additional information we may need."

The technology partnership has helped Farmsure close its skills gap

Farmsure's Farm Combined product platform was relaunched for new business enquiries in October 2021. So far, the brokers using it have praised its ability to improve efficiency.

"I want to take away some of the daily grind around inputting, that sort of thing and put it into getting a better outcome from a performance point of view. From a new business perspective, we have definitely seen some significant changes. But it's always a challenge when introducing something new to your staff. Some people will never see that new technology is going to be of benefit. But over time, they have changed their mind and said it's made a massive difference," said Mark.

INSTANDA's no-code and modular framework enables companies to build workflows from scratch to suit their requirements. This allows companies that want to keep aspects of their existing workflows the same while ensuring that their architecture is up-to-date and scalable for their changing needs.

For companies like Farmsure, this is especially important, as Andrew notes that the new system has enabled the company to address its challenges of growth versus resource.

"Having sufficient experienced technical resources will always be a challenge, so we need a system that can run as fast as we need it to, from a growth and efficiency point of view, to support our team. By 2024-2025, we'd expect to see our INSTANDA system running at a pace that matches our planned growth," said Andrew.

INSTANDA's core insurance platform future-proofs Farmsure's value proposition

The Farm Combined product is near completion of its current migration to the new platform. The Farm Motor product is expected to be finalized in its development by Q4 this year. Mark notes that migrating their previous system to the new platform and tweaking their management reporting and renewal processes are among the few things needed to ensure all links in the value chain can benefit from their all-new and streamlined insurance platform.

Andrew notes that after this process is complete, the complex Farm Combined Policy project will act as a template for future Farmsure product builds.

"A key part of our plan over the next five to ten years is product development. So what we're expecting from INSTANDA is the ability to deliver fast product development. With our smallholders' policy, we're hoping for a fairly quick build as it's quite a straightforward product. After this is complete, it will give us a system development pathway for the new products we have in the pipeline," he said.

Mark closes the interview with some final thoughts on the technology partnership with INSTANDA,

"When we first started, we had some great service. It was fantastic. INSTANDA took on board the project, managed it, got the right people in, and started it all off. They have members of their team that are very knowledgeable, very good at what they do. They helped us out to no end. So yeah, it's been great working with INSTANDA."