Tim Rayner reflects on three years as CEO of Verisk SBS

How would you summarise the past three years?

It’s hard to know where to start because three years have gone by incredibly quickly - whether it’s work, family or a combination of both, the seasons just disappear.

I would describe my first year as CEO as a learning year and quite a tough one personally in many ways. However long you have been at a company – and I had already been at Verisk SBS for four years before taking on this role - there is inevitably a lot to learn when taking a senior position of this kind. Having spent a lot of time listening, observing and thinking, I moved into the second year focused on resetting and realigning, while this last year has been about delivering real results

Even my own role has developed to an incredible degree. The Verisk group as a whole now focuses entirely on insurance, which is fantastic and enables us to really concentrate on what our clients need and make sure that what we offer is fully connected and relevant. Part of that is being aligned geographically and one of my responsibilities as part of Verisk’s senior operating committee is to focus on building our international work. I really enjoy working with colleagues across the globe, considering where we can offer relevant solutions and value.

What I continue to emphasise is that digital platforms and ecosystems are not here to replace brokers or underwriters. They are here to remove barriers that stand between them and their clients. Automation streamlines routine workflows. Structured data sharpens negotiations. Analytics provide deeper insights. Together, these tools reduce friction and free brokers to focus on advocacy strategy, and value creation. Technology is most powerful when it amplifies human expertise and relationships, not when it seeks to substitute them

What stands out the most?

Our focus has continued to shift from a products to a solutions mindset, and this has been a key theme over the past three years. What we want to do – what we have to do – is listen to our clients, take the time to research and educate ourselves, so that we can offer the solutions they need. Sometimes that’s a composite solution – combining our software, data, catastrophe models and more – to create something greater than the sum of its parts. Sometimes, it’s simply one product that the client needs. But the vital skill we have really developed over the past few years is making sure the answer to the problem is tailored exactly to that issue – and not simply bolted on with crossed fingers.

We’ve also delivered on some of our key promises recently, which makes me and the team very proud – in particular the launch of our Insurance Platform and of the Whitespace Platform Automation function. Linked to the latter, we’re delighted to have collaborated with McGill to develop the Lloyd's market's first fully digital cross-class auto-follow broker facility. Using our customisable rules engine combined with the Whitespace Platform, Auton offers intelligent automatic risk selection – a real step forward.

Part of the journey is also the growth of Whitespace, both in the London market and internationally. Since May 2025 we have gone live in Bermuda and Singapore, with Dubai soon to follow, Marsh has committed to the platform and I am incredibly excited by the interest shown by other brokers. This global potential is so important because (re)insurance is an international market. What use is a product or platform if only the people sitting in one city can use it? The London market will always be my home and where I have learned so much, but I can’t - and we can’t - allow ourselves to be parochial. We serve our clients wherever they are.

Of course the challenge is always to make sure that expansion is well resourced and we will remain sharply focused on that, with an account manager in Singapore, colleagues on the ground in continental Europe, a team in the US and one focused on MENA.

Looking more widely, in September this year, we broke records for attendance at our Verisk Insurance Conference London 2025 – more than 1,000 people gathered together to hear from all the businesses across the Verisk group. That is really encouraging and shows us that clients want to hear from us, are engaged with our developments and are staying on the journey with us.

How has Verisk SBS changed?

I’m very proud of what our team has established in the past three years across the firm. Chief product officer Richard Smith has established a great solutions team with Chris Spencer (director of solutions, underwriting), Taha Ahmad (director, pricing solutions) and Gordon Bathurst (director of solutions, broking) really leading the charge. This is at the heart of how we want to work and clients are responding very favourably. They see us being proactive and thought leaders - though of course we have to find the balance. When I was working for a broking firm, I wouldn’t have necessarily taken to a kindly to a supplier coming in and telling me how to do things! But a mutual approach to solving problems and creating solutions is fantastically effective.

I continue to work on evolving our culture and dispelling myths or outdated perceptions of Verisk SBS. The DNA of the business has changed dramatically and it’s hugely heartening to hear comments from the market that their view of our brand and reputation has turned around – I personally will continue to focus strongly on that, and encourage the team to do the same.

Are there any particular myths about Verisk SBS that you’d like to debunk?

When a company has been established for a long time, as we have, it’s easy for people in the market who don’t deal with us every day to hold an image of us that was formed 10 years ago or more. And in a market founded on relationships, first impressions can be hard to shift.

One example is the somewhat cynical view of why Verisk bought Whitespace some years ago now. It would be easy to operate the Whitespace Platform like milking a “data cow” for the wider Verisk business and yet that is the polar opposite of what we do. In fact, our standard contract gives us no rights to the data in the Platform – a principle that we are absolutely committed to. Having worked at a broker for many years, I am very mindful of this! Considering the volume of business that goes through the Platform, it seems the market trusts this too, so I believe we are on the right track. 

In fact, at a recent London market event, a leading broker referred to $5bn of premium in 2024 and $15bn of premium in 2025 going through the Platform.  It’s hard to argue with those numbers!

In three years, there’s been a transformation in how we approach investment in our solutions, quite apart from clients, so I believe the market understands now that while we do need to make money, we are also prepared to make investments ourselves.

What are the biggest challenges that you want to tackle for the rest of 2025 and 2026?

Looking ahead, it’s important to me to make sure that the Insurance Platform, which includes underwriting, broking, claims, exposure management, analytic functions, will have rolled out to all our Eclipse underwriting clients as soon as possible and we hope that the brokers will also be using the pre-bind functionality. That will truly show that we are committed to the vision and strategy that we’ve outlined to our customers, and that they can rely on us to deliver our promises. Our launch event was fantastically well attended, and the feedback gives us confidence that it’s all going in the right direction, and that clients are picking up the value of the modular based approach.

I was asked recently if it’s ever possible to build a solution or system that addresses every single technological need of one company, and my answer to that is a realistic solution is modular driven. That’s how we deliver a realistic approach to our clients, through a domain driven development. The organisational structure can be deployed as a complete structure or independently as standalone modules. That allows elective choice to clients, so that they can integrate with what they need, whether it’s compliance checking, sanctions screening, pricing, rating, exposure management, catastrophe modelling. And that integration can be with Verisk or third party systems.

The balance is avoiding the pitfalls of chasing the latest shiny buzzword tech - whether that’s cyber, blockchain, AI or the next trend – and forgetting to do the basics right. So we will always try to get that balance right, in anticipating future needs while also addressing those of the current day.