“Our transformation is ongoing and continuous. Digital transformation profile is not an effort that starts, has a middle and completes, it's an ongoing evolution.”
Speaking as group-level CIO of Hiscox, with CTOs for each business line reporting into him, Chris Loake (pictured) describes how he and his team have shaped an operating model that prioritises outcomes over roadmaps, and flexibility over monolithic platforms, with clear implications for customers, brokers, underwriters and claims professionals across the market.
Hiscox’s early forays into digital, such as its pioneering 24/7 quote-and-bind capability when it entered the US small commercial market, are recognisably of their time: discrete “waves” of e-trading, online products and new channels. Today, Loake insists, the model is fundamentally different.
The group’s focus is on improved customer and broker experiences, faster product launches, better risk selection at greater speed, supported by key results such as Net Promoter Score (NPS), end-to-end cycle time or call-handling metrics. Individual initiatives are then prioritised against those measures.
“When someone comes up with a new idea or a new initiative, we say, ‘Well, how's it going to support our objectives? Is it going to move it in the right direction, and which specific objective is going to impact?’” he explained. Ideas that do not shift any agreed key objectives fall away quickly; those that move several, rise to the top.
Crucially, this is not locked into an annual budget cycle. “I think the days of annual planning cycles are becoming a thing of the past,” Loake said. “The world moves at such a rapid pace now. You need to have a very agile process to be able to put something in on the left-hand side, over the period of two, three months, and now there's space to accommodate additional projects.”
For insurance executives used to traditional project governance, the most challenging leadership task, in his view, is moving any organisation from a project mindset to a product mindset.
“People become comfortable working in a certain way,” he said of the old model. “The challenge comes when you tell business leaders that transformation will not come with a fixed end-date and capital envelope. What we’re doing is building a capability that we continue to invest in and that’s going to carry on delivering a certain type of outcome.”
Loake is adamant that Hiscox’s technology strategy is focused on delivering value and enhancing the customer experience. While some financial services organisations “try quite hard not to talk to a customer” to keep contact-centre costs down, he said, Hiscox leverages technology to sharpen service, not avoid it.
“We want to use technology to continue to improve the customer experience,” he explained. In practice, that means supporting high-touch claims when they are needed, and frictionless digital journeys when they are not.
The example he offers is from the group’s high net worth UK business. When a homeowner is dealing with a flood, they likely want to speak to someone who understands their situation and can offer empathy and reassurance. This requires human interaction, intelligent telephony, real-time access to policy information and efficient, well-designed workflows for handlers.
By contrast, if that same customer drops a laptop, they don't want to call and speak to someone. They just want to have a straightforward process to replace the laptop with minimum fuss. The role of technology is to put technology in the right places, where it removes friction, and to empower the person-to-person interaction, where that's a very important part of the journey.
Rather than a single flagship programme, Hiscox now has around 300 different projects and initiatives in progress across the business that have got some form of technology in them. The sources are deliberately varied.
Some changes originate from in-depth customer insight, right down to analysing contact-centre call data. “Seventy five per cent (75%) of our calls are about X,” he said. “So we should do something about that.” Other changes come from strategic collaborations with large brokers, who provide valuable insight into “What would make your lives easier? How could we integrate more easily with you?” This feedback helps develop the right solutions for customers.
Innovation is not solely broker- or customer-led. In some cases Hiscox chooses to reshape the market itself. “We were the first London Market business to create an AI-enhanced lead underwriting model,” Loake noted. “People weren't really asking for that, but that was something that we knew was going to be a real game changer for us.”
Great ideas also surface from individual team members and C-suite conversations alike, from “one junior person in the organisation's idea that they championed and it got on the list” to a discussion with the Hiscox CEO. The operating model and architecture must therefore support new ideas, continual reprioritisation and high concurrency of change.
This approach, shapes how Hiscox thinks about its supplier ecosystem. Loake draws a sharp distinction between partners and vendors. Some vendors, he suggests, talk the language of
partnership but then “get to the end of that section and say, that's great. Now let me tell you about my products.” Of course, there is still “a place for that”, and Hiscox does buy point tools where appropriate.
True partners, by contrast, start from the insurer’s strategic goals and are prepared to co-create solutions. “Let me understand what you're trying to do, and then let me work out how we do that for you. And there might be a product in there somewhere, but that's not with you. If that involves one product or two products, or no products, then that's fine.” He cites Google Cloud and Microsoft as examples of strategic collaborators that fit this model.
If there is one takeaway from the past, it is the industry’s history of embarking on vast, all-encompassing platform upgrades, especially around core policy administration.
The pattern is common across insurance and banking alike: a legacy system nearing end-of-life, a decision to buy a replacement from a major vendor, and then a steadily expanding project scope as the platform is configured to do “everything”.
“Before you know it, it's trying to do everything,” Loake said, from core system of record and data warehousing to internal user interface and even customer portals. “This can be inherently risky and inherently inflexible. It always looks great on PowerPoint. It never works out well in delivery.”
In his view, the only architectural certainty is the need for flexibility, given the volatility of technology markets. “If you set out on a path with whoever's the market leader in anything today, and you think they're still going to be the market leader in five years’ time, your crystal ball is better than mine.” The answer is a “componentised architecture, not a monolithic one.”
For a group with operations across multiple jurisdictions, another temptation is to pursue uniform systems irrespective of local regulatory and product differences. Hiscox has chosen a more nuanced approach: shared frameworks, blueprints and tools, but allowance for local workflow and language.
Taking customer portals and quote-and-bind as an example, Loake said “the core framework is going to be the same everywhere.” Markets plug their own Hiscox branding into a common UI design, alter fields and screens, and develop their own workflows. But foundational elements such as authentication, password-reset and core processes are reused group-wide rather than rebuilt multiple times.
Over recent years, this has been formalised into an architectural blueprint: “when you're trying to do this type of thing, this is the tool that you use.” If a standard does not yet exist, a country can propose a tool which may then become the default for others. Loake likens the result to an orchestra: “you may all be playing different instruments, but they're all in harmony with each other.”
Artificial intelligence, which started as “a small experiment” at Hiscox, has in Loake’s words become “a significant part” of operations, with multiple live use cases benefiting customers, brokers and internal teams.
One prominent example is in the UK art and private client (APC) business where AI supports quote handling. There, Loake said technology “can deal with twice the number of quotes per day” for underwriters, effectively doubling productivity and allowing the line to scale without proportionate increases in headcount.
In Hiscox London Market, lead-augmented underwriting for its sabotage and terrorism book has reduced quote times dramatically. Loake notes that the business “took that from three days down to three minutes to get a quote out.” The same email data-classification technology has been repurposed for reinsurance, where an underwriter workbench now processes around 25,000 renewal emails in a concentrated end-of-year period, automatically classifying and routing them and reducing the risk of items being overlooked.
Behind these examples lies a deliberate strategy of reuse. The reinsurance workbench was assembled in four months by reapplying components from London Market projects and European portal frameworks, a fraction of the 12-18 months, a comparable build would once have taken.
Digital change in the insurance industry has, at times, been accompanied by front-line resistance, especially from underwriters and claims handlers wary of disruption to established ways of working. Loake acknowledges that “there's always a level of inertia when you're making change to the way people work,” and that for busy staff “learning a new system wasn't one of the tasks they planned to do that day.”
However, he believes Hiscox has now built enough credibility that momentum runs in the opposite direction. New systems are perceived to “make their lives easier, and they're making their customers lives easier and the brokers lives easier,” and “now what we see is people reaching out for stuff, ‘What about if you did that? Wouldn't that be good?’”
This is reinforced by the way projects are structured. Ideas often originate with business users, who then become product owners and “super users” embedded in cross-functional delivery teams and take ownership of adoption in their own areas. Gone, Loake suggests, are the days when change “popped into the side of the factory and then out came something at the other end that may not be what you wanted.”
Looking ahead, Loake expects two major shifts in insurance as AI and automation become more embedded.
First, as administrative work is increasingly streamlined, he believes the biggest differentiator will be human relationships. Freed from low-value tasks, underwriters, brokers and claims professionals will be able to spend more time with clients and trading partners, and those who use that time most effectively will be the real winners.
Second, he sees a need for consistent “data fluency” across the organisation. Hiscox has launched a group-wide assessment of every individual’s capability, followed by bespoke training to upskill them if needed. The rationale is simple: “data is going to be the thing that all of this technology is powered on,” and poor-quality training data will undermine even the most sophisticated models.
“The solution to that problem is you need the people that are doing the work that will ultimately feed that data to be data fluent,” he argued. In other words, data quality is no longer just the concern of actuaries and data scientists; it is an everyday responsibility for everyone in the value chain.
Loake’s focus on data quality and governance extends beyond insurance. He sits as a non-executive on the board of Companies House, the UK government arm’s-length body that maintains the companies register. A recent Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act has given Companies House a far more assertive mandate to validate information and help tackle fraud, and Loake’s role is to provide “counsel and coach to the executive team” as they transition from “a repository of unfiltered and unclassified information” to a genuine “gold standard of information about companies in the UK.”
Loake did not set out to be an insurance technologist. He began his career in accountancy before moving into technology and spending 11 years at Experian, which he describes as “a software and data company, doing data stuff for all industries”, including motor insurance. That was followed by about a decade in banking across two organisations, where he saw clear parallels with insurance: intangible products, complex regulation and increasingly digital service models.
“I didn't have a specific burning desire to get into insurance,” he admitted. But in conversations with Hiscox he “got more and more excited about the opportunity” and has now been with the group for just over two years. He characterises insurance as “an exciting industry with a lot happening, maybe slightly behind banking when I joined, although I think it's catching up fast, with a big ambition to do more and to be better.”
He is equally clear about the societal role of the sector. Insurance, he argues, is “a really important part of small businesses, of society, that people can take risks and feel confident to do so.”
Despite the demands of his day job and governance work, Loake’s downtime is hardly sedentary. He has two young sons, both keen swimmers, and describes himself as “also an athlete myself. I've always done sport. Rowing is my current sport of choice.”
A former junior international rower, he spent many years as a competitive cyclist and in 2018 “won a silver medal at Gran Fondo World Championships” before returning to rowing, now out of Walton Rowing Club in Surrey. His training regime begins early: “I get up at 4.20 every morning.
It is a revealing detail. The same discipline and long-term mindset that take an amateur athlete to world-championship podiums are now being applied to the complex work of transforming a global insurer, not as a one-off project, but as continuous evolution.
