DQPro Turns 10

By Nick Mair

Ten years ago, I had what would now be recognised as founder burnout. 

Our change and data consulting business was making money, but it was hard going. Every client was different, every project was different, and when your product is people, that carries its own ongoing challenge. 

My hours were long and relentless. On top of that, I had just become the proud father of twins, and sleep was in short supply. Something had to change. Alongside our resourcing business and data warehousing consultancy, I had a product idea that had been nagging me, in a good way, for some time. So, I made the difficult decision to gradually wind down services and pivot to product, to focus on it full time. 

Building on a Hunch

Our work in data warehousing had long shown us the reality of data in the specialty insurance market: 300+ lines of business, quirky processes, a tangle of legacy systems, and regulations that moved faster than systems could keep up. 

Keeping tight control of carrier data in that environment was almost impossible. Data was often wrong, missing, out of range, or failing compliance checks. 

These data issues kept leaking through the front-end of the business, creating multiple inefficiencies downstream, not just in data warehouses, but across most carrier business teams: underwriting, ops, claims, actuarial, finance, and, worse, compliance. 

The arrival of Solvency II had started to shift attention towards data, but it wasn’t yet a board-level priority. Data issues continued to cause operational friction and despite improvements, carriers were still getting poor audits from Lloyd’s and the PRA.   

We noticed that Ops teams were often first to field inbound data, carrying much of the burden. But they were on the back foot because the traditional solutions provided to them were so poor: Excel, exception reports, and tactical SQL or worse, overly complex data quality tools that no business side user wanted to use. 

Our idea was simple: to build a business-first product that continuously monitored data across policy, claims and other carrier systems, helping business teams to better find, resolve, and report on those issues quickly. 

Early Days

With a ready audience from our consulting work, and inspired by Steve Blank’s thinking on starting lean, I pitched a five-slide deck of the idea to five carriers. 

Two showed interest, but one, a forward-thinking London Market carrier, offered to partly pay for it. It was a small amount and yet massive in terms of early product validation. 

Those kinds of bets are rarer today. But 2016 was the start of Insurtech 1.0, when carriers were open to exploring new ideas and partnerships.  

Backed by their CIO and working closely with their Ops team, we got to work on what became a year-long build. After months of early mornings and long hours of engineering, on April 1st, 2016, DQPro v1.0 was born. 

By today’s standards it was basic. But we’d stayed so close to the business that alignment was strong, and it started delivering value to Ops teams immediately. 

We had originally envisaged DQPro as an Ops tool. But within a few months, something interesting happened; other business teams, from very different areas, started asking for it too. 

That first customer was Brit Insurance, and it’s no exaggeration to say their vote of confidence changed everything. 

They became a strong first reference customer, and yet, as any fellow founder knows, insurtech can be a long, hard and slow process. Insurance companies are notoriously conservative buyers. No one wants to be first which makes overnight success almost impossible. In fact, it took us almost another year to win our second. 

Brit helped again, hosting our next demo in their boardroom at the top of the recently opened Cheesegrater. On a beautiful summer evening, with the sun setting over London, Tokio Marine Kiln became our second. 

Not long after, Markel followed. Then another. And another. 

Fast forward 10 years, and I’m incredibly proud that we now support nearly 50% of the world’s leading specialty carriers, with teams across underwriting, operations, claims and actuarial using DQPro every day to drive better data, data accountability and stronger controls. 

Along the way, we made many learnings and mistakes, but two lessons stand out: 

1. When it comes to DQ in Specialty, let the Business lead and IT/Data teams support 

Data in specialty insurance isn’t getting simpler any time soon.  Global distribution, decades of legacy process, more active regulators and ongoing system spaghetti mean that data risk remains a serious daily issue to manage. 

When issues occur, you need to catch and resolve them early, instilling ownership with the people closest to the data. In insurance, that means engaging real business teams; underwriting, Ops, and claims. IT and Data teams can help but often miss the context. 

The truth is that traditional data governance and technical enterprise DQ tools have always struggled to connect with these users. Even as I write, there a handful of well-known carriers wasting thousands trying to disprove this fundamental truth. 

With DQPro, we have actively managed to bridge the critical gap in specialty between business and data teams to complement their downstream work and deliver a win/win for all. 

2. The Market Moves Faster When You Build Together 

I believe that data quality and compliance is one area where, when carriers work in isolation, progress is slow.  When they work together, patterns and standards started to emerge. 

That thinking led to the creation of our DQPro Market Standard™ ruleset — a shared library of data controls built from real-world contributions across our customer base. 

It continues to evolve with use, strengthening as more carriers contribute, refine and adopt it.  This has resulted in: 

• Faster implementation
• Broader coverage for all 
• A higher bar for operational data quality across the market  

Our latest version will be released to all DQPro customers in May. 

Looking Ahead 

Much has evolved over the last 10 years in how the market stores, manages, and validates it’s data. However, complexity has only increased.  Insurtech 1.0 was a welcome shot in the arm of progress but simply added more systems into the data flow.   

In parallel, data regulation has only increased in an era of greater privacy, solvency requirements,  AI ethics, and cyber-risk. AI, and especially machine learning, requires a continuous supply of trusted, clean, historical data to support algorithm development and yield best results. 

With that (and AI) in mind, I’m super excited about our roadmap and, with over 10 years of deep market integration, real operational data, and a solid global community of carriers now behind us, we’re perfectly placed for what comes next. 

So as DQPro turns 10, I’d like to thank everyone who made it happen: our A-class team, now expertly led by CEO James Loft and COO Sarah Hilton, my co-founder Andy Williams, our passionate and vocal customers (especially the early ones!) and all of our partners and friends out there who have been part of our journey to date. 

Thank you….and here’s to the next 10! 

Explore how DQPro helps specialty insurers with their data here.