Chris Newton: Send Technology is focused on ‘solving real world problems for underwriters’

For Chris Newton, chief technology officer at commercial insurance platform provider Send Technology, a passion for technology has been a self-taught love affair.

Newton joined Send in June 2024 from cyber resilience firm Immersive Labs, where he was vice-president of engineering.

Speaking exclusively to Insurance Times, Newton says: “I literally fell into tech. I was a sports man, [but] I very quickly realised that I wasn’t good enough to be a professional cricket player, which was what I really wanted to do.”

Starting out in his first tech role back in 2003 – as a web developer at Sesame Services – he stumbled across a hefty book on hypertext markup language (HTML) coding and was immediately fascinated.

“I remember reading through and thinking ‘I can have a go building a website’. I went back to my desk, wrote a bit of HTML code, saved it and this website opened in front of me – it literally blew my mind,” Newton explains.

”I was very self-taught in the early days. I was building websites for family and friends.” 

Becoming a chief technology officer has “long been a career aspiration” of Newton’s. With this achieved, his primary aim now is to focus on Send Technology’s growth.

He says: “I’m here to think about the next phase of growth.

“That means focusing on the technology platform which underpins our products and making sure that we have the scalability that we need. It’s focusing on making sure we have a strong, high performing team and supporting the wider delivery of the ecosystem that sits around the product.”

In the next six months, Newton hopes to improve Send Technology’s products and use of data, as well as tap into the “magic” of generative artificial intelligence (AI), which he believes can provide chief underwriting officers with more exposure insights.

He continues: “I am really excited about bringing [generative artificial intelligence] deeper into the platform. It’s all about solving real world problems for underwriters – there’s just so much opportunity.”

’Ripe for disruption’

For Newton, technology is “front and centre of everything” – his passion for technology, which started in his early 20s, has only intensified as time has progressed.

He says: “As I started moving into leadership roles, the depth and breadth of what I was reading about and exploring grew. With generative AI, the rate of change has increased rather than slowing down.

“Innovation in technology never ceases to amaze me – I try my best to hang on to that evolving landscape. I like to be in a position where I am doing positive things with technology – that’s become a bigger part of how I think about my career and growth moving forward.”

Newton cites ChatGPT as an “incredible use case” of generative AI, for example.

Newton also believes that the commercial insurance sector is “ripe for disruption”.

He explains: “There are real world problems around trying to manage structured and unstructured data, [such as] all the submission data [for underwriters] being received on different channels. We have a massive opportunity there.”

Newton notes that underwriters often have to manually sort through an inbox of risk submissions that have no standardisation for how data is submitted – whether it is in a spreadsheet, a text document or other attachments.

Send has a product called Smart Submissions, which launched in June 2023. This uses generative AI to automate the data submission and extraction process.

He continues: “There’s more opportunity around how underwriters select the right risks. How do we ensure Send is helping underwriters prioritise risk selection and declining risks that are not valuable?

”If we do that well, the long-term impact on the insurer is one that will see more business, but also loss ratios hopefully improve over time because of better risk selection.”

The right data and beyond

Newton says the “real power of Send’s Underwriting Workbench” – a cloud-based, AI driven platform for managing new business, renewals and endorsements that the firm developed in 2018 – is giving “the right data at the right time to make the right decisions on that risk”.

However, Newton adds that many underwriters are forced to act purely on intuition because they do not have “the [right] data at their fingertips”. But this is “what Send [is] helping with”, he notes.

Newton firmly believes that there is ”a competitive advantage” in sharing data.

He says: “If [firms] can use data in the right way, [they can] leverage the power and insights that it provides and then ultimately feed back into pricing strategies. It’s about future risk and the pricing strategy. There’s so much potential.”

Send is currently working with a few early stage insurers that do not have the burden of legacy systems, Newton adds. This means that these insurers can be a “bit more nimble” in their data use.

“Generative AI has the potential to be a risk, but it can also solve some problems,” he says. ”A lot of big insurers are waking up to this.” 

For Newton, using generative AI is a “strategic imperative” for Send Technology and the firm will be investing further into this technology.