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Hey it’s Fabio here,
Across the market, many insurers are still running core pricing and underwriting logic in spreadsheets. The issue is no longer whether that worked in the past. It is whether it can support scale, governance, and AI in the future.
So we focused on a practical question: what does it actually take to move from spreadsheet dependency to a pricing and underwriting platform that is digital, governed, and AI-ready?
Dani explained how Optalitix helps insurers move spreadsheet-based pricing into a digital environment, and how that creates the governance, workflow, and structured data needed for scale.
1. Dani, for the many insurers still living in spreadsheets, how do you explain what Optalitix actually does?
What we do is we take those spreadsheets and all the code and formula built into them, and we convert that into an API.
That means you go from a spreadsheet, where one person can run each calculation at a time, to a digital service that can be used at scale.
At the same time, you capture all the data that goes into and out of that spreadsheet, so you know exactly what was done and how it was calculated.
It also reduces errors, manages versioning, and gives you much better governance and control.
So you’re going from a spreadsheet environment with low scalability and low governance to a fully digital platform with structured data.
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2. Your recent Intermont partnership is a good example. What was Intermont trying to change, and what made Optalitix the right fit?
Like most underwriters, they historically priced their business on spreadsheets.
They’re an MGA, part of the Acrisure group, and they wanted to scale - they’ve got plans to scale across Europe. The problem is that the spreadsheets were holding them back from digitising the whole pricing platform.
So what they wanted was effectively an underwriting and pricing platform that would allow them to take all the existing logic very quickly, turn it into something digital, and then scale it across Europe.
Their intention is to grow and expand the business they’re doing, but in a way that met governance requirements, met the requirements of their capacity providers, met the requirements of regulators.
3. When it comes to modernising pricing and underwriting, how is workflow and governance actually handled?
We have two products.
One of them is Models, which is the system that converts spreadsheets into APIs.
The second one is Quote, which is a pricing front end that seamlessly integrates with Models.
It sits on top of the Models platform and the whole underwriter workflow is set in the Quote platform.
It goes from quote submission, capture, pricing, underwriter evaluation, underwriter decision, risk measurement, and document generation.
Everything is integrated into one single platform.
So the governance is maintained by all the information being captured from the start to the end and the pricing system being embedded within that governance platform.
4. What is a concrete example of that modernization in practice?
A good case study is Pool Re.
They asked us to build a platform which all the insurers could log into and Pool Re could then supply the treaty information and the pricing information to those insurers all in a consistent, confidential manner. They could then assess the prices and bind the treaties themselves by DocuSign.
We built that platform and launched it last year. It’s called Fortress.
Before that, it was massively manual.
Lots of email, lots of manual work, lots of errors. This way everything was consistent, it came to a single point, and the pricing data was captured, so it’s a consistent governance-driven approach with a lot fewer admin people involved to chase insurers to get them to sign the treaties.
The takeaway from Dani is hard to ignore: if underwriting logic stays in spreadsheets, AI will stay stuck in pilots. Dani’s point was that modernising pricing infrastructure is what creates the data, control, and workflow needed to move underwriting into a more scalable and AI-ready future.
Fabio Caravita — say hi on Linkedin
Founder, AI Insurer Brief
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