At our vFormation Live event on 10 June 2021, Eugene Van Biert, Chief Revenue Officer of Duck Creek Technologies spoke to Chris Griffiths, Executive and CIO of UPC Insurance and President of Skyway Technologies, about how UPC Insurance is evolving its core business and insurtech capabilities to launch new customer experiences and a highly differentiated product into the marketplace.

Launching the dynamic and exciting discussion, Van Biert commented: “What is particularly interesting in this interview with Chris is his thoughts on how the flexibility of technology is delivering against the promise of enabling speed, opportunities, and optionality within the business at UPC, which has been a key customer of Duck Creek for two years.”

Looking at how the business case is delivering on its promise of what was expected, Griffiths said: “We started our journey with Duck Creek with a Claims system – and we went live in July 2019 – following which, we moved into Policy and Billing and the Data platform (Insights). We’re around two years into the implementation, which is going very well. Reducing technical debt from our legacy platforms and total cost of ownership reduction are always top of mind as a CIO, and Duck Creek is giving us the tools and enabling us to do both of those fairly quickly.”

Duck Creek is talking a lot in the market about the new standard in Property and Casualty insurance and enabling its customers to do exciting things – and last year, Skyway Technologies (part of the UBC / UIHC family) was looking to expand its market and explore other channels. With the strong collaboration between Duck Creek and UPC already in place, Skyway was able to open up existing direct-to-consumer business written through its agent channel via an easy-to-use platform to quote business – using the Duck Creek technology behind it.

Griffiths commented: “It truly does leverage the Duck Creek inheritance model, and it allows us to take products we have already built and filed for use in the agent channel and add a distribution channel for the direct-to-consumer market. The most exciting thing is that from ideation in November 2020 to delivery, we will be launching Skyway direct-to-consumer for condo business in Florida this summer.” Further expansion into other products and states is planned.

A recording of the full interview can be found here