Many re/insurance companies are still “dinosaurs” when it comes to using technology and are unable to unleash the power of their data in a timely fashion.

That’s the view of Andre Perez, one of the pioneers of insurance-linked securities (ILS) and the founder and former chief executive officer of Horseshoe Group, which is now part of the Artex Group.

Perez, who has now founded a technology company, H2, and a re/insurance group, Nascent Holdings, which has technology at its centre, says the re/insurance industry has a lot of catching up to do in terms of technology.

“I’m going to be nice,” he says of the industry in a video interview with Bermuda:Re+ILS. “We are dinosaurs when it comes to the use of technology.”

He says the main differentiator for his new companies is that they are “technology-driven ILS services providers”.

“How do we use the latest technology to help us deliver services efficiently?”

“After selling Horseshoe to Artex, the next phase was ‘how do we use technology?’. Whether it’s artificial intelligence (AI) or robotics or machine learning, how do we use the latest technology to help us deliver services efficiently and increase transparency to investors?”

“If you think of the older established companies, which have technology that is now ageing, all they have done is patch this and patch that, and they’ve end up with a 10-headed monster. Knowledge is power—if you don’t have access to your data and you’re not able to extract the value from it, then you are going to be far behind,” he says.

Perez says he is excited about developments in AI such as ChatGPT which, he says, will enable the industry to eliminate manual and repetitive processes.

“AI certainly has many applications, but it’s going to enable us to become more agile, to avoid those repeated and manual processes, and make our business faster, cleaner, and more efficient.”