Nobody Wants to Plug a Billion Dollars of Premium Into an Unproven Startup

Katey Walker is a credentialed actuary, which she notes tends to change the expression on people’s faces the moment she says it. She earned that credential over eight years at Liberty Mutual, inside one of the industry’s largest actuarial rotation programs, before moving to CNA, then into actuarial consulting for about six years, then five years at Willis Towers Watson leading the P&C practice across strategy, technology, and actuarial work, then a stop at Aon helping brokers rethink what they offered reinsurance clients. Every stop added a different vantage point on the same question: what does it actually take to run the operating layer of an insurance company.

That question is Xceedance’s entire business. The company doesn’t write policies, doesn’t deploy capital, and doesn’t take on risk. What it does is everything in between — underwriting, claims, actuarial work, cat modeling, policy administration — for insurance companies that would rather buy deep, vertical domain expertise than build every function themselves. Katey is the company’s first-ever Chief of Staff, effectively what she calls the hand of the king to CEO Arun, Xceedance’s founder.

In Episode 145 of InsurTechTalk, Katey and I covered why Xceedance calls itself a services company and not a core system, how it stood up a brand-new state FAIR Plan from scratch in 120 days, and why she thinks the biggest barrier to InsurTech adoption isn’t the technology — it’s convincing a carrier to plug a billion dollars of premium into something unproven.

About Katey Walker

Katey Walker is Chief of Staff to the CEO at Xceedance, a global insurance operations and services company that provides underwriting, claims, actuarial, and cat modeling capabilities to carriers, MGAs, and reinsurers without ever holding capital or issuing paper itself. A credentialed actuary, Katey spent eight years at Liberty Mutual, then time at CNA, six years in actuarial consulting, five years leading the P&C insurance consulting and technology practice at Willis Towers Watson, and a stop at Aon before joining Xceedance. Founded twelve and a half years ago by CEO Arun after Berkshire Hathaway wound down its India operations he’d been running, Xceedance has grown to roughly 5,500 employees across five offices in India, about 600 people in the US, a couple hundred in Poland supporting European operations, roughly 50 in London, a presence in Australia, and a newly announced office in Manila. The company serves more than 350 clients globally and recently closed its first-ever outside capital raise, led by Portage Capital.

Services, Not a Product — On Purpose

Katey is explicit that Xceedance has deliberately stayed out of the core-system and product business, even as it builds AI-driven tools internally.

• Xceedance provides business solutions across the full insurance operating stack — underwriting, policy issuance, claims, actuarial, cat modeling, marketing support — everything except capital and paper
• The company is intentionally vertically focused on insurance only, rather than offering the same operations-outsourcing model across multiple industries
• Every function is staffed by domain specialists — actuaries, underwriters, claims professionals, cat modelers — with technology and AI layered around their expertise rather than replacing it
• Some AI-driven internal accelerators are under consideration for productization, but for now Katey is clear: “services is probably the best place to stick us”

From a Failed Startup to Berkshire Hathaway India to 5,500 People

Xceedance’s origin story starts with its CEO getting laid off from his own company — sort of.

• Arun had a couple of unsuccessful earlier attempts at online insurance ventures before becoming CEO of Berkshire Hathaway’s India operations
• When Berkshire decided after a few years not to continue those operations, Arun gathered about a dozen people who understood insurance and pitched Berkshire’s leadership on providing services back to them, using the domain expertise the team had already built
• The company started with cat modeling and analytics, added what Katey calls lifecycle and operations work (underwriting and policy issuance), then claims, and kept expanding services from there
• Twelve and a half years later: roughly 5,500 employees globally, and a workforce distributed specifically to match where insurance talent and time-zone coverage make sense — including a new Manila office, opened partly because the local team already works US hours

Meeting Carriers Where They Actually Are

One of Katey’s sharper observations is that a single standardized pitch doesn’t work across the range of insurers Xceedance serves — tier-one global carriers and tier-three or tier-four regional ones need fundamentally different approaches.

• Larger carriers generally have more capacity to free up ten people for a project, but still have to coordinate across multiple regional entities, each operating under different local laws — UK law differs from French law, which differs from US and South American law
• Smaller, regional carriers often aren’t headquartered in major talent hubs and face real constraints on local resources and hiring
• Xceedance’s approach with smaller carriers is roadmapping rather than pitching a full transformation: identifying which step a company is actually on and building toward what they can absorb next, rather than selling them the same solution offered to a tier-one carrier

Standing Up a State FAIR Plan in 120 Days

The clearest illustration of what Xceedance actually does end-to-end came from a recent engagement building an insurer of last resort from nothing.

• A FAIR Plan is a state-run insurance fund of last resort — typically for auto or home coverage — for people who are legally required to carry insurance but can’t get it from a private carrier
• A state came to Xceedance to stand up a brand-new FAIR Plan — the first new one created in the US in over 20 years — and Xceedance was recommended based on its work with other states’ existing funds
• Xceedance helped secure the fund’s financing, stood up every operational service the plan needed, coordinated the vendor relationships required, and had the plan writing business within 120 days of starting

A Fully Digital Claims TPA

Xceedance also runs claims operations as a third-party administrator, built around remote adjusting rather than a traditional branch-office model.

• Customers submit claims documentation, including photos, directly through an app instead of waiting for an in-person inspection to be scheduled
• Remote adjusters handle assessment digitally, removing the need to maintain a costly physical office footprint in every market
• Clients — whether an insurance company or a self-insured business running its own claims function — get a live dashboard showing cycle time, number of touchpoints, and days elapsed from first notice of loss to settlement
• Katey frames this as claims handled in a way that simply wasn’t operationally possible before digital tools made remote, photo-based assessment reliable at scale

Funding for M&A, Not for Runway

After twelve years without ever raising outside capital, Xceedance closed its first round with Portage Capital — and the rationale had almost nothing to do with needing cash to survive.

• Xceedance has been growing organically at a fast clip, particularly in claims, underwriting, and analytics, and was already cash-flow positive
• It completed three acquisitions in the year leading up to the raise, bringing in new capabilities and, importantly to Katey, teammates who fit culturally and share the company’s vision
• The capital raise was specifically about having cash available to move quickly when the right acquisition target appears, rather than being limited to pursuing one strategic opportunity at a time
• Beyond capital, Katey values Portage as a partner with genuine expertise in insurance, growth, and technology — someone to stress-test ideas with, not just a source of funding

What’s Actually Slowing the Industry Down

Asked what the market is missing, Katey pointed to data infrastructure — and to how badly the previous generation of data projects were executed.

• The current buzzphrase is data-driven transformation: unlocking structured, unstructured, internal, and external data sources that were never unified before
• She’s skeptical of the old “data lake” era of two-to-four-year centralization projects, which often froze other operational work — actuarial analysis and claims reporting included — while all focus went into moving data into one place
• Her blunter framing: those projects frequently just moved legacy, poor-quality data into a single new location without improving its usefulness — “you just shoved all the garbage into the lake”
• Today’s AI and analytics tools let teams extract insight from data quickly without that years-long centralization step first, but the two real constraints remaining are legacy organizational thinking and regulatory comfort with new methods — she draws a direct parallel to her own past experience filing an early credit-scoring model with regulators who had never evaluated one before

The Real Adoption Barrier: Trust at Scale

Katey’s closing point ties directly back to why a services company with a twelve-year track record has an edge that a newer point-solution vendor doesn’t.

• The insurance vendor landscape is expanding fast — parametric insurance, digital tools, a growing number of specialized startups — which is exciting but creates a real evaluation burden for carriers
• Her framing of the core tension: a carrier isn’t just buying a feature, it’s deciding whether to plug a billion dollars of premium into a specific piece of technology
• That’s a legitimate reason for caution, not just institutional inertia — proving durability and reliability is what actually earns a vendor the right to be embedded into core processes

Key Takeaways

• Xceedance’s differentiation is depth, not scope: full-stack insurance operations expertise across underwriting, claims, actuarial, and cat modeling, deliberately kept to one vertical
• Meeting carriers at their actual operational maturity — not pitching a one-size-fits-all transformation — is what makes engagements with smaller, resource-constrained carriers work
• A 120-day timeline to stand up a state FAIR Plan from scratch is a concrete demonstration of what full-stack operational expertise can do that a point solution can’t
• Raising capital after twelve profitable, bootstrapped years was about M&A speed and a strategic partner, not survival — a meaningfully different story than most InsurTech funding rounds
• The failure mode of the last data-transformation wave wasn’t ambition, it was multi-year centralization projects that froze operations without improving data quality
• The real gate on InsurTech adoption is trust at scale — carriers have to believe a vendor’s technology can carry real premium risk before it gets embedded into core processes