Cytora chief executive reveals how insurtech moved to ‘global structure’

Cytora’s chief executive Richard Hartley has revealed that the insurtech had to change its structure after executing its expansion strategy over the last few months.

Harltey told Insurance Times that that the London-based firm had moved to a “global structure” and was deploying its services in a new country each month.

Since beginning to branch out worldwide, the firm has managed to put teams in place across Europe, including Spain, France and Germany, as well as Australia, the US and Asia.

Hartley said the main challenge of the firm’s expansion was having to change the structure of the firm.

”What works when you are small doesn’t always work when you are larger – things break as you grow,” Hartley said.

”So, you have to constantly evolve the structure and hire new people who can come in and help provide the expertise for that new phase.”

‘New capabilities’

However, Hartley noted that it was important to ”develop new capabilities” and learn new skills.

”What you need when you are a small startup is very different to what you need when you are a growth company,” he said.

And he highlighted that the main target was “making sure its customers generate value that they expect from our platform.”

“We really obsess over benefit realisation for our customers in terms of uplifted gross written premium per fixed term, improved control and consistency over every selection and much faster turn around time,” Hartley continued. 

”When we hit those numbers ahead of time, we feel good about our business. We are really obsessed about that and our own growth – our revenue will be a consequence of that.

“We really focus on our customers because if we make them successful, then we’ll be successful as well.”

‘Exciting time’

As a result of its expansion, as well as moving into new countries, Cytora has managed to diversify to serve different types of insurance lines.

For example, it intially focused on geopolitical risk, but can now provide solutions for commercial property and casualty as well as specialty lines.

“It’s helping us build a more impactful [and global] product because you realise over time each country is quite different in how its regulated [and] the structure of the industry,” Hartley said.

He added: “We’ve doubled revenue over each of the last consecutive years.

”We’re continually growing the volume of customers we have. We are also growing where we have deployments.

”Pretty much for every month, we’ll have a new deployment in a new country, it’s a really exciting time.”