Robin Gilthorpe: Earnix continuing to grow organically as it deepens footprint

As Robin Gilthorpe approaches his two year anniversary as chief executive at Earnix, having taken the helm in January 2023, he is now looking to further grow the insurtech organically for 2025.

In 2024, insurance and banking analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) business Earnix looked to build on the momentum of the previous year and, along the way, has broken into some key markets – including London – while attempting to help insurers provide appropriate capacity and pricing.

Speaking exclusively to Insurance Times, Gilthorpe says: “We continue to grow at a good, accelerated pace organically. Numbers are numbers, but we have done very well – better than planned in terms of growth, profitability, customer acquisition and retention.”

The insurtech, which was founded in 2001, now has customers in 35 different countries and, in September on day two of the Earnix Excelerate conference, it announced that it was expanding its London yet office again.

“A big focus over the next year is to increase our geographic footprint,” he explains.

“I am looking to double down in the countries where we already are in. We are increasing investments in our key markets and right here in London.”

This investment is part of the firm’s 2025 planning and includes creating more personalised and connected work for insurers and banks.

Gilthorpe continues: “The thing I am most proud of is how we have been able to engage culture building and alignment between teams. As we grow and work with a bigger and more complex customer base, across different situations, driving that alignment is super important.

“Our goal is to make our customers’ businesses run better, helping insurers to underwrite the right risks for the right prices and the right offers – and putting them in front of the right potential consumers.”

Single platform

Gilthorpe says that he believes having a single platform that can be configured rather than coded is key in dealing with all the different kinds of scenarios that the business’ clients may present.

Its platform uses artificial intelligence (AI) to offer dynamic pricing and modelling for insurers.

He explains: “When you have a configure approach, it is more reliable. It means a shorter code set. It performs better and more predictably. It leads to a high quality output, but also for multiple product writers of insurance – those multi-jurisdictional writers of insurance – we confer particular advantages in terms of operational leverage.”

For Gilthorpe, the firm’s expansion “proves the value of the platform”.

“It also gives us plenty of opportunities to learn and to feed those learnings back into the platform,” he adds.

Innovation

In terms of innovation, which was the theme of his keynote during the Earnix Excelerate conference, Gilthorpe says that Earnix “expects its teams to innovate everyday” –adding that ”they do”.

Under his leadership, the company also hosts internal tournament style hackathons where teams can experiment with the latest tools from Earnix and a theme. 

He explains: “It makes it fun and completely competitive. That gives us new impetus and frankly, some of the results of hackathons have ended up as features or functions in core products that sit on our platform as they are separate and specific enough that we produce them as plugins.”

Earnix covers the full spectrum of general insurance. But it is also well versed in property and casualty, as well as personal lines. 

Gilthorpe explains: “The pet insurance segment, [for example], has been lively and engaged.

”You can surmise from the spike in pandemic puppies and kittens from a few years back, in that you get people three to four years down the line saying, ‘I need some pet insurance’.

”We have around a dozen pet insurers as customers, it was one of those things that went from zero to a lot quite quickly, so we are alert to those possibilities.”

The company has quite deliberately not tied itself into any one line only, preferring to provide help to insurers across the market.

Gilthorpe explains: “What’s interesting about insurance is that it is so broad in its impact and interest groups. You get seasons of real and intense interest in any [line], depending on the size of that sector.

“Given the scale of the sector, we view this as something that takes an ecosystem to solve it. We are constantly and actively looking for partners to work with, who can help enable us to move the industry along.

”There’s [not] any single company, however big, that can satisfy the entirety of needs [in insurance].”