The Data Gets Built Once for a Renewal, Then Thrown in the Bin

Ben Rose’s route into insurance started, by his own account, almost by elimination. He studied music at university — not performance, but music as a lens for studying history, philosophy, sound, and ethnomusicology — and graduated into a UK internship market where most programs required a technical degree. Lloyd’s of London was one of the few employers genuinely open to people from mixed academic backgrounds, and Ben’s first internship landed at the Corporation of Lloyd’s, in IT operations, where he got early exposure to agile working and market modernization efforts around 2014.

A Lloyd’s graduate scheme followed — stints in risk, then strategy, where as the resident “young person who understands apps” he was tasked with imagining what an app-enabled Lloyd’s might look like. A year underwriting property catastrophe reinsurance at a Lloyd’s syndicate came next, and it was there that the manual reality of the business hit him directly: physically tearing binding staples off paper broker submission bundles so they could be scanned, downloading files from file-sharing portals, and hunting for the right numbers buried in Excel spreadsheets sent inside zip folders. A subsequent role at Aon Inpoint — Aon’s internal strategy consulting arm, competing directly with McKinsey and BCG but backed by Aon’s own transaction data covering roughly a third of most reinsurance markets — gradually pulled him toward insurtech specifically, eventually making him Aon’s point person in London for startups wanting to engage with the firm, and a mentor with Startupbootcamp InsurTech.

In Episode 69 of InsurTechTalk, Ben and I covered how Supercede evolved from a broker-placement tool into a full three-sided reinsurance platform, walked through the mechanics of how a reinsurance deal actually gets built and placed, and explained why so much of the industry’s data effectively gets thrown away the moment a renewal closes.

About Ben Rose

Ben Rose is President and co-founder of Supercede, a reinsurance platform connecting cedants (the insurers buying reinsurance), reinsurance brokers, and reinsurers. He co-founded the company in 2019 alongside Jerad Leigh (CEO), a reinsurance broker he trained for a marathon with, and Jezen Thomas (CTO), a software developer they connected with while validating the idea. Before Supercede, Ben worked at Lloyd’s of London across IT operations, risk, and strategy roles, underwrote property catastrophe reinsurance at a Lloyd’s syndicate, and worked in Aon’s Inpoint reinsurance strategy consulting practice.

From Riskbook to Supercede: Why the Rebrand Happened

Supercede didn’t start under that name. The company launched as Riskbook, built around a specific, narrower problem: creating a better way for reinsurance brokers and reinsurers to trade business with each other. The timing mattered — Aon had just launched its own broker-placing platform (ABConnect) and Guy Carpenter had launched GC Marketplace, both mono-broker tools. That raised a real structural risk for the market: if every large broker built its own proprietary placing platform, underwriters would need a different login and workflow for every broker relationship, fragmenting their work and likely degrading data quality as smaller brokers, with smaller technology budgets, tried to keep pace. Riskbook’s original pitch was to be the independent reinsurance trading platform serving brokers and reinsurers alike, rather than another walled garden tied to one broker.

The rebrand to Supercede came a couple of years later, after the team realized they’d left out a critical participant: the cedant — the actual buyer of reinsurance. A key hire, actuary Paul Basson, brought firsthand experience with the pain point that turned out to be foundational: cedants prepare submission packs full of complex exhibits, but those exhibits get rebuilt from scratch in Excel for every single renewal, in inconsistent formats, and are effectively discarded once the renewal closes rather than reused or structured for next time. Supercede added a cedant-facing component — a structured web application where cedants build their exhibits once, with automated validation catching the kinds of errors Paul had spent his career finding manually — giving cedants real confidence that the data going to market on deals worth hundreds of millions of dollars is genuinely clean. That third leg turned the platform into a genuine three-way ecosystem: cedant, broker, and reinsurer — which is where the name Supercede comes from.

Reinsurance, Explained for a General Insurtech Audience

Ben walked through the underlying mechanics for listeners less familiar with the reinsurance market specifically. An insurer or MGA accumulates a portfolio of policies over time — motor insurance, property, whatever the line of business — and has to decide how much of that underlying risk to retain versus transfer. A company might buy reinsurance to offload concentrated exposure (catastrophic hailstorm risk, for instance), or because its strategic focus is distribution, claims handling, and customer acquisition rather than balance-sheet risk-bearing — in which case it may cede a large share of its book to reinsurers in exchange for a ceding commission, letting reinsurers absorb the underlying risk while the insurer focuses on what it does best.

Preparing a reinsurance placement means assembling a genuine sales pitch to the market: policy counts, values, locations, historical rate change information, loss history, and — critically, since reinsurance is bought in advance — forward-looking estimates of what the coming year’s exposure will look like (his example: an airline insurer having to estimate next year’s flight volume to support its aviation reinsurance pitch). Most cedants work through reinsurance brokers (Supercede focuses specifically on broker-placed business) who help shape that pitch, validate it, and match it to what the market is actually interested in underwriting. The broker then faces a genuinely difficult coordination problem of its own: a single large placement can involve 50, 60, or even 70 different reinsurance companies, each needing to be approached individually for quotes across multiple layers of coverage, followed by issuing firm order terms, tracking authorizations as they come in, and ultimately allocating signings across dozens of participants so the total adds up to exactly 100%.

Where Riskbook Left Off and Supercede Picked Up

The original Riskbook problem was specifically the broker’s side of that coordination challenge — replacing a giant, error-prone spreadsheet tracker with structured relationship management, a placement pipeline, and built-in checks across the whole quote-authorize-allocate cycle. Supercede’s later addition tackled the earlier stage: getting a cedant’s raw, messy, multi-tab spreadsheet data into a clean, structured, validated digital submission pack before it ever reaches a broker or reinsurer.

Supercede does offer some broker-reinsurer discovery and relationship-matching functionality, particularly valuable for smaller brokers without an existing global network of reinsurer relationships. As the brokers using Supercede have grown larger, though, Ben noted this feature increasingly functions more as convenience-oriented contact and relationship management than genuine market discovery, since larger brokers with established global offices typically already know most of the relevant counterparties.

From Three Months to Two Weeks

Ben gave a specific, concrete before-and-after: preparing a full reinsurance submission pack — turning scattered spreadsheet data into a clean, market-ready digital pack — traditionally took up to three months. With Supercede, that compresses to roughly one to two weeks. The actual placement stage (quoting, authorizing, signing, binding) traditionally runs right up against the industry’s dominant January 1 renewal deadline, with many people working through Christmas and New Year and, in some cases, deals still unresolved days into the new year — a genuinely painful seasonal crunch for both the industry professionals involved and clients wanting contract certainty. Supercede’s aim is to compress that stage down to roughly the length of a live demo, limited mainly by how quickly market participants themselves choose to respond.

A secondary, less obvious benefit Ben highlighted: freeing up time doesn’t just reduce stress, it changes what’s actually possible during a renewal. He cited direct feedback from a recent, difficult renewal season where brokers had to tell clients that, however much they might want to explore a genuinely different reinsurance tower structure or new coverage triggers that year, there simply wasn’t time — the safest, fastest option was repeating the prior year’s structure and hoping the market went along with it. Supercede’s placement tool lets brokers spin up and simultaneously quote multiple different deal structures rather than one at a time, giving clients room to actually be more ambitious with structuring when time allows rather than defaulting to the path of least resistance under deadline pressure.

The Reinsurance Podcast

Ben and the Supercede team also produce a dedicated podcast on the topic, fittingly named The Reinsurance Podcast, available on Spotify and Apple Music (and discoverable through Supercede’s own LinkedIn page) — a genuinely niche show, as Ben pointed out, in a category with very little existing competition.

Team, Funding, and Staying Neutral

At the time of recording, Supercede had grown to roughly 30 people, with a growing presence in the US. On funding, Ben was direct about a deliberate strategic choice: Supercede has taken capital exclusively from specialist third-party software investors (primarily UK-based), specifically avoiding any strategic investment from a major broker or reinsurer. His reasoning: if a large broker or underwriter held a meaningful ownership stake in the platform, other market participants would reasonably hesitate to put their own data into it, undermining the platform’s core value as neutral infrastructure. The company was preparing for a Series A round roughly a year out at the time of this conversation.

The Bigger Bet: Growing Reinsurance From 10% to 30% (or Beyond)

Ben’s closing framing laid out Supercede’s long-term thesis. Citing Swiss Re data, he noted that only around 10% of the roughly $2 trillion global non-life (P&C and specialty) insurance market gets reinsured — translating to a roughly $200 billion reinsurance market sitting on top of it. Life reinsurance, by contrast, sees something closer to a complete inversion, with roughly 90% of business eventually reinsured, a difference Ben attributed partly to a smaller, more concentrated set of players and simpler underlying mechanics in that market.

His core argument: today, buying reinsurance is painful and slow enough that companies treat it as an occasional, dreaded internal project rather than a routine capital management tool — and that friction directly caps how much reinsurance companies are willing to buy, which in turn limits their strategic flexibility, growth options, and capital efficiency. Supercede’s ambition is to remove enough of that friction that non-life reinsurance penetration could realistically climb from roughly 10% toward 30%, 50%, or higher over time — turning reinsurance into something companies buy far more readily and often, benefiting cedants, brokers, and reinsurers simultaneously.

Advice: The Ignorant Maestro

Asked for a closing recommendation, Ben pointed back to his musical background, recommending The Ignorant Maestro by conductor Itay Talgam — a leadership book built around the idea that a conductor’s real job isn’t to be the best player of any single instrument, but to empower genuinely different sections (strings, winds, and so on) to each excel and play together coherently. Ben drew a direct parallel to leading Supercede’s own mixed team of insurance and reinsurance experts alongside software engineers: a leader doesn’t need to be the best underwriter or the best developer in the room, but does need to bring fundamentally different kinds of expertise together into something coherent for the customer — a balance he considers especially relevant across insurtech’s often similarly mixed teams.

Key Takeaways

• Supercede evolved from Riskbook, a broker-and-reinsurer placement tool, into a genuine three-sided platform after realizing the cedant — the actual buyer of reinsurance — was the missing piece, and that cedant submission data was being rebuilt from scratch and discarded every single renewal
• A large reinsurance placement can involve 50-70 separate reinsurance companies on a single deal, each needing individual quoting, firm order terms, authorization tracking, and signing allocation that must sum to exactly 100% — a coordination challenge Supercede’s original product was built to manage
• Supercede compresses reinsurance submission pack preparation from roughly three months to one to two weeks, and aims to compress the placement stage itself down to as fast as the market is willing to move, rather than being bottlenecked by administrative back-and-forth
• Freeing up time during a renewal doesn’t just reduce stress — it changes what’s structurally possible, letting brokers explore genuinely new deal structures instead of defaulting to repeating the prior year’s structure under deadline pressure
• Supercede deliberately took funding only from third-party specialist software investors, avoiding strategic capital from any major broker or reinsurer specifically to preserve the platform’s credibility as neutral market infrastructure
• Non-life reinsurance penetration sits at roughly 10% of a $2 trillion global market, compared to roughly 90% in life reinsurance — a gap Ben attributes significantly to the sheer friction and cost of buying reinsurance today, which Supercede’s core thesis is built around closing
• The “ignorant maestro” leadership framework — empowering domain experts rather than trying to personally out-expert them — offers a useful model for insurtech teams that routinely combine deep insurance expertise with software engineering talent