From teenage chef in Essex to group chief commercial officer at DUAL, Scott Sayce (pictured) has built a career around underwriting judgment, data and technology. Now he is continuing to drive innovation, strategy and oversight of DUAL’s new initiatives, while still finding time for clay pigeon shooting and his dogs.
For someone now charged with steering one of the market’s most active MGAs through a period of rapid market change, Sayce’s route into insurance was anything but conventional.
From the age of eight he wanted to be a chef and even appeared on one of the first Junior MasterChef series. He went on to work parttime in a local restaurant in Essex, before landing a position in London at Café Dell Ugo, an Antony Worrall Thompson restaurant.
That culinary trajectory was abruptly rerouted when, aged 18 or 19, he met his first wife on holiday and relocated to Wales. The move made a London kitchen career impractical, forcing him to “completely reinvent” himself and take a local role in finance. After a young marriage and equally early divorce, he returned to Essex.
It was a neighbour and family friend of his mother who finally nudged him into the sector, pointing him towards a role at a London insurance brokerage where she worked as senior filing clerk. He secured an assistant junior broker position, his first step into insurance and quickly moved into underwriting.
From the outset he rejected the welltrodden path into property and casualty. Instead he gravitated towards what was then an emerging line: cyber. At a time when “maybe five, six, seven insurers” were prepared to underwrite the class, he joined a fledgling MGA as its sixth employee, writing cyber risks with thirdparty capital.
Eight formative years followed, travelling across North America, AsiaPacific and the Middle East, building cyber books and broker relationships (“a Friday night in Sydney and then a Monday night in Leeds” sticks in his mind). A spell inside two large global carriers came next, rounding out his perspective on scale, governance and complex stakeholder management.
That blend of agile MGA experience and bigcompany discipline ultimately brought him to DUAL as Group Chief Commercial Officer with a mandate to focus on emerging risks and innovation “to take us to the next evolution” after nearly three decades of growth.
Sayce is wary of the phrase “digital transformation”, which he regards as suggesting a oneoff plugandplay exercise. His own definition is more continuous and human.
For DUAL, he says, it is “about bringing the best talent, data and technology together”. The human element is, in his words, the “squishy bit” of that trio, the judgment, expertise and market relationships that no amount of code can replicate. Without it, the data and tooling do not amount to a specialty proposition.
He draws heavily on his dual vantage point. The MGA world taught him to move “at pace” and make “informed decisions” in response to market demand. Time inside tierone carriers instilled patience and a more architectural understanding of how global businesses actually run.
That combination is central to his current role in a group with 1,700–1,800 staff across more than 20 countries: a culture that “wants to move at pace” but to do so in a controlled way.
When asked what problems DUAL set out to solve with its recent investments, Sayce resists the idea of a single burning platform. The group’s focus, he argues, is consistently on its people and the brokers they serve.
Much of the value, he says, lies in “invisible work” that will never win awards: streamlining submission handling, eliminating double and triple keying, reducing the time underwriters spend hopping between Word, Excel, PDFs, emails, printouts and scanned notes.
The goal is an environment where underwriters feel “empowered with the tools” they use and are able to make “quicker, data driven, fast paced, confident decisions”. Speed is important, but so is resilience; both ultimately feed into improved broker response times and a better return on deployed capital.
Nowhere is this strategy more visible than in DUAL’s cyber division, which has been the testbed for a new integrated underwriting platform over the past 12 months.
The starting point was a global proposition refresh. The more radical part has been the digital plumbing behind it. A broker’s proposal form, emailed in as usual, can now be ingested into an AIdriven triage layer. Rules set by DUAL feed data automatically into the policy administration system and then into the pricing engine.
Within that same environment, the system flags missing information, and underwriters can call out to an external partner to run a passive “outsidein” cyber scan, returning a security and hazard grade for the insured. That turns what might previously have been two or three hundred pages of corporate submissions into a concise, prioritised package.
Where a complex account review might once have taken six or seven hours, Sayce says the integrated workflow now surfaces what underwriters regard as the “right information” within 15–20 minutes. It is not merely about throughput; it is designed to keep focus on the “right risks” while improving the quality and consistency of decisions.
Four external partners sit behind that platform. Two have already been publicised: KYND and CyberCube. CyberCube feeds into the openmarket underwriting platform, while KYND provides the “hacker view of risk”, passive scanning of the attack surface and clear redambergreen reports that brokers can discuss with clients, alongside continuous monitoring for bound policyholders.
For all the technology, Sayce is clear that he is “not our technology person”. That role belongs to DUAL’s Chief Operations Officer, whom he describes as “phenomenal” and critical in assessing both business fit and technical feasibility.
The approach to partnerships, he says, is deliberately simple but disciplined. The first test is whether a solution “is going to create value” rather than merely being a “nice to have”. Beautiful interfaces and polished sales pitches are viewed with suspicion if the vendor has not clearly understood DUAL’s business model.
Understanding how DUAL wants to build, and what outcomes it is targeting, is nonnegotiable. Clear communication from the outset is expected on both sides. Partners must also be prepared to “move at pace and lean in”, cocreating where necessary rather than insisting on a rigid, outofthebox product.
In the end, he sums up the criteria as alignment, transparency and tangible value. Even apparently promising relationships can be set aside if strategic goals diverge during due diligence or early build phases.
On deployment, Sayce is blunt: trying to switch on everywhere at once is a recipe for conflict and blockage. The cyber rollout followed a deliberate sequence.
Australia and New Zealand came first. Both markets already had solid digital trading platforms and a high volume of smaller accounts traded electronically. Cyberspecific enhancements and external partnerships could be layered onto a relatively receptive base, providing strong early evidence of value to brokers and underwriters.
North America followed on the digital trading side. Europe, with its concentration of larger risks and 12–13 countries underwriting cyber, demanded a different emphasis, on workflow, triage of voluminous documentation and openmarket case underwriting.
Throughout, DUAL has operated a crossregional steering committee on a sixweekly cadence, bringing together representatives from each territory, plus finance, to review what is working, what is not, and whether the programme remains on budget. Lessons learned in one region are actively shared as the platform moves to the next.
This incremental approach did not eliminate teething troubles. The team openly encouraged Australian underwriters to “break the platform” before launch, in order to flush out usability issues and identify where the user experience might be too complex. A series of API integration challenges duly surfaced and had to be resolved in the fortnight before golive, with teams in London and Australia working late nights and weekends.
The choice to test hard before brokers saw the system, he argues, has paid off in smoother external adoption, even if it made life uncomfortable internally in the short term.
For Sayce, the hardest work in any change programme is not the codebase but the culture. Aligning “behaviours and expectations” typically takes longer than implementing the technology itself.
He emphasises storytelling and transparency, setting out clearly why a change matters, how it is intended to benefit underwriters, brokers and clients, and then backing that up with tangible milestones rather than slogans. Some staff want every conceivable question answered before they commit. Others are comfortable with a direction of travel and are happy to “learn the rest as we go”. Both mindsets must be catered for.
His own biggest leadership challenge, he admits, has been balancing ambition with capacity. By instinct he likes to “move at pace”, but he is acutely aware that underwriters, operations and technology teams already have demanding day jobs. Any digital or operational change, however positive in the long term, adds pressure in the short term. Knowing when to “hit the gas” and when to “pump the brakes” has been one of the key tests of his role.
To support that change, DUAL has invested heavily in data. A Group Head of Data and Analytics joined about six months before Sayce, and regional analytics teams now work alongside underwriters. A dedicated cyber analytics function supports the cyber division. Data is being organised into a modern Lakehouse architecture, with the Head of Data involved “defining what great looks like” in mapping information flows for new platforms.
Sayce is clear that no single technology will reinvent the industry. The more important evolution, he argues, will be in operating models, with insurers, reinsurers and MGAs acting more like “symbiotic platforms”: connected, datarich and able to scale intelligence across their organisations.
He is, however, explicit about the role AI will play within that. “We are underwriting led, but technology enabled,” he says, and AI sits within that as a “teammate”. It should “enhance underwriters” rather than replace them, augmenting, not supplanting, the relationships and institutional knowledge that remain core to specialty lines.
In cyber, the AIdriven submission triage is one example. In North American homeowners, AI has been used to overturn traditional rating based on broad ZIP codes, where risk is assumed to be uniform across an area. Working with a specialist AI firm, DUAL has moved to “granular precision scores down to the actual property level refinement”.
Instead of a single price for a given region, the model can distinguish between individual streets and even specific house numbers. That delivers better value for capital providers, more precise risk selection for underwriters and fairer pricing for policyholders, particularly where legacy maps have painted whole districts as exposed to hazards, regardless of the experience of individual homes.
Again, for Sayce, this is about giving underwriters information they “wouldn’t have been able to even contemplate” 10 or 15 years ago, while keeping the final risk decision with the human.
Away from work, Sayce is rarely still. He is “an avid clay shooter” and tries to get onto the clay ground at least every couple of weeks, competing when his travel schedule allows. He belongs to a claypigeon shooting club that has made a conscious effort to attract younger shooters and women into the sport. On a typical Saturday, he estimates, the line can be as much as 60–40 men to women – a balance he is delighted to see, even if it occasionally means applauding a nineyearold who shoots better than he does.
Home life is anchored by his family, including two stepchildren, one of whom now lives in Thailand with his granddaughter, and his youngest daughter, who is studying psychology at university and, he jokes, leaves him “crying” after using her new techniques on him.
He and his wife are keen on good food, though she draws the line at joining him on the shooting ground. Two dogs, a foxred Labrador and an English blue roan working cocker spaniel, complete the household and provide additional excuse for long walks between flights and conference calls.
It is a portrait of a leader who has come a long way from a London kitchen pass, but who still prizes craft: whether in a restaurant, on the clay ground or in the structure of a cyber programme, the work, as he sees it, lies in getting the balance right between the squishy bit and the hard bit and then letting the results speak for themselves.
