Company: Niander Aurora Limited (Aurora): Aurora have developed an initial digital and have a highly experienced team with extensive industry experience, supported by UK/global advisory board of top insurance providers. Aurora is a holistic, digital platform seeking to augment how commercial insurance is purchased and managed. Working with customers on a direct basis or via selected broking partners, we cater to micro, small and medium businesses. With Aurora, customers can get personalised, real-time quotations, compare insurance providers and transfer and mitigate risk in a uniquely tailor-made way. All while benefiting from analytics and data driven education and advice. Issue/demand: Aurora have been approached by the insurance industry and SMEs to resolve a continuing unmet/unresolved market need. Traditionally insurers sell off-the-shelf package products with coverages that a customer may not need, as well as coverages missing that they do need. This may be due to some insurers only offering types of covers or insurance within specific segments or may be an amalgamation of the cheapest insurance quote by cover. Also, it is acknowledged by insurers that these policies have evolved incrementally, resulting in very large, hard to read/inconsistent documents with conflicting wording and policy limits. Solution: To develop Aurora's Algorithmic Trading (AT-AURORA) - an innovative digital trading product to meet market need by delivering uniquely tailor personalised packages of insurance cover online in 15mins (instead of industry standard of 4/5 weeks) with each cover priced individually and amalgamated in real-time into an appropriate, single, coherent (understandable) insurance package. Project funding will be to design, develop and deliver an MVP consisting of three modules: a co-insurance mechanism, computable contracts proposition, and algorithmic trading/underwriting, each interoperable with Aurora's existing platform.

This project will develop a ground-breaking approach to insurance, delivering a digital platform that brings tailored, modular co-insurance to businesses. Customers can get quotes in real-time from multiple providers, bundled into one price, with full transparency over their cover. The platform will also define insurance contracts in a machine-readable form, resulting in much greater clarity on the covered events / limits and allowing both customers and claims handlers to understand and interrogate the cover on offer. This will allow for better understanding and pricing of risk and help to avoid instances such as the recent problems seen with Covid business interruption insurance that led to court cases being necessary to establish if this risk was actually covered. The innovation will benefit customers, reducing the ~£216.2mil SMEs spend each year on insurance they don't need (Suited.Insure) and enabling greater confidence in their insurance cover, allowing for increased risk-taking and greater growth as a result. It will also benefit claims handlers, with liability determined faster, leading to prompt claims settlement and saving administration time. Our innovation will use a Prolog database with new policy-wording segments and rules for usage that will define insurance contracts. This approach delivers clarity of wording and the flexibility to ensure the right cover is in place, avoiding the underinsurance currently estimated to affect ~80% of businesses (Sedgwick). This sets us markedly apart from existing state-of-the-art. While there are some online brokerages in the UK, all are reliant on existing PDF policy wordings -- the majority of which are based on legacy systems that have been transformed incrementally, in some cases over decades, leading to confusing or conflicting wording and an unintentional lack of transparency. This in turn drives confusion over coverage and an inability to tailor policies to the specific need. Current providers can only quote the most straightforward cases in real-time, with delays occurring for all other cases. Our co-insurance platform will transform the market, helping to restore consumer confidence in insurance, empowering SMEs with individualised insurance cover, and bringing a UK-based digital company to compete with international incumbents.