First, a big thank you to our customers, across the risk & insurance value chain, who have trusted Archipelago with over $7tn of their unique property TIV on the platform. After launching in 2020, our growth has been extraordinary because we’re tapping into a paradigm shift that’s already underway. Simply put, leading owners of property, and leading buyers of commercial property insurance, are looking to own, and act, on their own view of their risk. They value their partners in the insurance industry; yet are increasingly looking for 'more' than just coverage. They are also determined to manage their risk within a larger context and shift decisions upstream across a wide range of strategies to optimize their cost of risk and increase their resiliency across their assets and business operations.
The response Archipelago has received deepens our conviction that this paradigm shift, fundamentally, depends on great data: data, efficiently connected from customers’ own verifiable sources of truth, immutably represented, and comprehensively dimensioned to support the specific needs of the risk & insurance proposition.
And, we’ve shown how this data, within "Smarter SOVs™" on Archipelago, differentiates our customers and delivers business impact and improves insurance outcomes creating win-win-win outcomes for our customers, and their brokers and insurers.
This shift goes beyond the placement and insurance renewal cycle. Our customers are exploring mitigation and resilience-related use cases on Archipelago. They’re incorporating the platform further upstream, including into their asset-level due diligence processes and capital investment allocations. And, they’re creating new strategic options for risk transfer, such as powering indemnity-based corporate cat bonds from high quality data on their exposures. A growing range of decisions across the lifecycle of property/risk are being data-powered by the Archipelago platform.
When we first launched, our Foundational Customers were all institutional owners of commercial real estate (CRE). And since launch, so many more leaders in the CRE sector have come “on stream”. We’re also thrilled by the response we’re getting from large corporations beyond CRE who also have substantial property holdings and/or sizable commercial property insurance programs, covering not only their buildings, but their contents, equipment, inventories and business interruption exposures.
The Archipelago platform has proven to be very expressive, and our data on-boarding practices have proven relevant across a wide range of owners and “operators”, across asset classes, property types, and business sectors.
The flywheels are turning. Customers are getting immediate value, saving time and effort to prepare, enrich, validate and maintain their schedules; and receiving positive impact from their insurers who value, and credit, high quality data that’s easy to consume via Archipelago. Risk Managers are introducing us to their peers with enthusiastic references, and to their brokers who in turn are introducing us to their other customers. And leading underwriters are now closing the loop by encouraging their top accounts to adopt for the mutual benefit of all parties across the value chain.
While we’re hardly a month into 2022, we’re already seeing a further acceleration of these patterns. The faster we can all wring out the inefficiencies and uncertainties in the data, the faster all can benefit from better insights, better decisions, and better solutions.
We’re in this together. And given the stakes for resiliency, on a global scale, the sooner, the better.
Onwards, Hemant.
