(Image source: Sequel homepage.)

Sequel Business Solutions (London), a business unit of Verisk (Jersey City, N.J.) has launched Sequel Hub, which the company characterizes as a flexible solution designed to simplify the distribution of standalone products and delegated authority business. The company reports that Sequel Hub has launched with over 10 carriers and two of the top three brokers.

Sequel describes Sequel Hub as orchestrating seamless messaging between brokers, carriers, delegated authorities, and market systems, enabling intermediaries to place submissions, receive quotes and access capacity from multiple carriers through a single system. Hosted in the cloud Amazon Web Services (AWS), Sequel Hub is based on Rulebook Hub, an API hub for global insurance policy distribution acquired by Sequel in 2018, with additional shared elective services including submission, triage, routing, auto-rating, pricing, and data augmentation.

Sequel Hub was designed to address the challenges presented by an increasingly fragmented insurance marketplace, wherein many carriers have developed their own placement portals and brokers use an ever-expanding range of channels to distribute risk. Sequel notes that, given these market conditions, brokers are required to manage and maintain potentially dozens of API connections with individual carriers, and to log in to numerous carrier portals to assemble a panel of quotes for any given risk. This approach, the vendor says, is expensive, time-consuming, and unsustainable.

“The proliferation of point-to-point solutions and lack of coherent placing standards has made distribution highly inefficient in the London Market,” stresses Ian Summers, CEO, Sequel. “As an industry under pressure, we can and must do better. Brokers should not have to manage and maintain dozens of API connections to place risks, and market participants should be speaking the same digital language so they can transact quickly and affordably. Sequel Hub brings together data standardization, real-time connectivity and automation with the best available data to make distribution simpler, more efficient and more intelligent.”

Building on the work of Sequel, ACORD and the Sequel6 (composed of six of the leading managing agencies at Lloyd’s) to develop a new data and API standard for the London Market, Sequel Hub standardizes messaging and automatically interprets, translates, and routes messages between parties, bringing huge efficiency to distribution workflows.

Saving Time and Resources

“A single message into Sequel Hub can result in many actions, meaning a broker can receive quotes from multiple carriers from a single submission, for example, rather than rekeying submission data for each carrier,” Sequel explains in a statement on the Hub’s launch. “Crucially, users of Sequel Hub will be able to send and receive messages from within their own systems, eliminating the need to maintain multiple direct connections. This will save significant time and resources, increase the speed of doing business and improve the quality of data flowing through the distribution chain.”

Data presented to Sequel Hub can also be seamlessly fed in and out of market systems such as PPL and Whitespace as well as integrating seamlessly with solutions such as Sequel Broking, Sequel Underwriting and Sequel Rulebook Hub, and can be enriched and augmented with data, analytics, and machine learning tools from the wider Verisk organization, the Sequel statement says. As well as simplifying distribution, this empowers users with deeper real-time insights and lays the foundations for automated underwriting and future innovations, the statement adds.

ACORD and Sequel Partner on London Market Next-Gen Placing Standards