Why Better Data Helps Underwriters Say 'Yes' More Often | Mark Varley & Simon de la Hoyde
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Who are Mark Varley and Simon de la Hoyde and what is Addresscloud’s mission?
The MCP server is a really useful channel in that it allows us as the custodians of that data to be able to establish guardrails and tell and inform and prompt the AI to not go off. So when we first started, we plugged it in and we thought, this is fantastic. But it was going off, it was taking data that we'd answered and displaying that.
Hello and welcome. My name is Jake Harding, and you're listening to Making Risk Flow, Exploring the Ecosystem, a new companion series to the Making Risk Flow podcast, where we sit down with data providers, technology leaders, and Cytora partners to uncover actionable knowledge on how insurance can achieve frictionless risk flows. Today we're joined by Mark Farley and Simon de la Hoyde of Address Cloud. Nice to meet you, Mark and Simon. How are you doing? Good, thanks, Jake. Good to meet you too. Good to see you today.
Yeah, likewise. All good, Jake.
Nice to see you again. Looking forward to the conversation. Yeah, me too. Thank you for joining us. So could we start off with a quick introduction to both of yourselves and your backgrounds and then a quick overview of Address Cloud's mission?
Yeah, sure. Happy to start. So I'm Mark. I founded Address Cloud just over 10 years ago. I've been working in the insurance industry for 25 years. I guess I'd call myself an accidental insurer and accidental geographer. So I kind of fell into this, started my career at Accenture. I was working in the solutions consulting practice at Accenture, got placed onto an insurance project. 20 odd years ago with RSA and been working there ever since really. And then within that, found my niche that I've been working in, so probably for 15 years or so, which is all things geographic risk. So yeah, looking forward to getting into that today. And really, as I say, I came at this as a practitioner, so working on the customer side, working on the client side and had a kind of an itch that I wanted to scratch.
And that's really where Address Cloud was born.
Yeah, Simon Delahoy, I am the client director here at the team at Address Cloud. I've been with the team for five years, but geography for me goes all the way back here to university days. And somehow I've managed to continue to utilize that skill in every role that I've been in ever since, which is a bit of a blessing, I guess. And certainly for the last 17 years in the insurance markets, dedicated into the insurance market, but have worked in the area of GIS, In other markets, including mobile telephony with radio wave propagation, modeling for mobile phone companies with retailers to do site selection for high streets and footfall. But yeah, as I said, for the last 17 years, looking at geographic risk within particularly the underwriting and pricing domains of the property insurance market and worked for a few organizations in this space for some time now.
Awesome. Thank you. So quite a rich background between the two of you then focused really heavily on kind of geography, geospatial and insurance. And how about Address Cloud then? What's the elevator pitch for Address Cloud? And perhaps how has that changed over the, let's say, the last kind of six months to a year?
Yeah, absolutely. So in terms of Address Cloud, the problems that we solve is we help customers understand where the property is, what bad things can happen to it. So what perils it might be exposed to, and obviously providing those specifically down at the building level, as opposed to some of the more broader ways that people have looked at risk in the past. Understanding the property itself, what's its physical characteristics, kind of what its vulnerability might be to some of those perils that we mentioned, as well as other kind of underwriting factors. And then finally, and then in terms of where we see quite a lot of interest in demand from customers now is understanding the accumulation risk, but importantly, understanding it pre-bind.
So before I go on cover, if I write this property or if I write this schedule portfolio, what are the things that I might be exposed to in terms of the concentrations in my own book?
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
Who are Mark Varley and Simon de la Hoyde and what is Addresscloud’s mission?
0:06–5:22
2
How does Addresscloud use building‑level geospatial data to improve underwriting decisions?
5:22–18:52
3
How are AI and the MCP server used to keep geospatial data trustworthy?
18:52–26:56
4
Why is accumulation risk analysis important at the point of quote?
26:56–34:20
Speakers
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