Team size: 12

What are the most significant cases and/or transactions that your legal team has recently been involved in?

The last 24 months have been incredibly challenging in the insurance market. The rapid rate of regulatory change in the context of a global pandemic, a hardening market, and numerous natural catastrophes have made doing business tough. The compliance burden is more now than it ever has been in my career and is only getting worse. With interest rates on the rise, it is hard to see an investment returns for insurers improving and this will place pressure on premiums and consumers doing it tough post-pandemic. Looking back on the last few years, I have had to re-write all the company policy three times over, firstly in relation to the change of a security provider, then for the Unfair Contracts Team and for platform delivery. It has been the busiest few years of my life, but I am incredibly proud of what I have been able to achieve for the business. It has helped to reposition ProRisk, a company traditionally recognised as an underwriting agency, an award winning insurtech. Having done it through such a turbulent period says a lot about our business and my team.

Looking forward, what technological advancements do you feel will impact the role of in-house legal teams in the future the most?

At ProRisk, we have invested heavily in developing our own proprietary quote bind platform. One of the features that I am most proud of, as I am also one of the Responsible Managers (RM) on the licence, is the platform’s ability to API into existing compliance software to produce real-time, pre-bind sanctions checking including KYC, ATF, and AML checks. When a broker visits ProBind, our proprietary quote/bind platform to place a policy with us, we know before they bind it that the insured is 100 percent compliant with local and international lists. Any hits are quarantined and referred straight into compliance for further investigation. Technology such as this will become more and more available in the future and in-house legal teams have an obligation to utilise it to our advantage to improve the security posture of our organisations and help make the business community in the markets in which we operate, more resilient to the growing list of external threat vectors. Just three years ago, we were completely reliant on staff to conduct these checks, but by automating the process from quote to claim our staff are freed up to trade and can do so with the knowledge that they are completely compliant. We cannot after all, expect every one of our sales representatives and claims officers to also be experts in international law.