Everyone in my house loves to cook, but we have very different tastes. In case you haven’t noticed, I am French. I like French cooking, which means thyme, tarragon, chervil, and des Herbes de Provence. Occasionally, if I’m feeling exotic, I will dash in with some flower petals, capers, or even marjoram tied up in a bouquet garni. My wife, on the other hand, is English through and through. For her it’s bay, basil, and mustard. Lots of mustard.

We both complain when the oregano runs out.

The balance changed a few years back when we discovered the Mowgli Restaurant cookbook. We both like to cook – and especially to eat – Indian meals in founder Nisha Katona’s special Indian street-food style. It’s cumin and turmeric, of course, but with cloves and coriander, nigella, chili, very occasionally some star anise, and – yes – mustard.

Any regular cook with lots of spices in their life will know the challenge that this broad taste presents. They’re in a drawer, all jumbled about. Or they’re on a cupboard shelf, half invisible, so those at the back are duplicated four or five times, because it is easier to replace what cannot be found quickly.

I solved the problem last week, you will be pleased to learn (and perhaps even happier that I am about to get to the point). We bought an amazing, six-tier, open-faced, metal spice rack. It is now mounted firmly to our kitchen wall (as firmly as my DIY skills allow). Each little wire shelf holds nine standard spice jars, along will the normal collection of oddly shaped tubs and bottles.

The point is this. Cooking is like underwriting. For maximum efficiency, all of the little ingredients you need – common or obscure – must always be easily to hand. No matter what you’re cooking – or underwriting – you don’t want to have to go hunting whilst the temperature drops. For your underwriting workbench, simply swap data for spices. You want all the data you need in just the right place, and available just when you need it.

Unfortunately that’s not how they all work. Some require a bit of online searching here, a database interrogation there, and maybe some geo-location via Google maps (then a cross reference to the modeller’s geocoding system, which never seems to agree). Then switch over to a data feed from you’re satellite provider, until you find what you need there. Then it’s somewhere else for the sanctions check (that’s actually done by the underwriting assistant in the next office, so it’s either an email he will ignore for a while, or get out of the chair and go down the hall), then finally another check for the underwriting authorities. It’s all over the place.

The solution is simple enough. Anyone who’s underwriting system does not put all the right data in exactly the right place for precisely the person who needs it to perform the specific task they face at this very moment is using the wrong underwriting system. Many will do what you need, but fewer do it when and where you want. One of the many that doesn’t do it at all is likely to be the one you’re using.

But here’s the deal. Underwriters have to eat their own cooking, and don’t want anyone to share in their lunch, which means they must operate at peak efficiency. So, tech developers, here’s my advice to you. Figure out exactly what each of your users needs every day, and put it on an easy-to-reach shelf on their desktop.

But different cooks need easy access to specific and diverse ingredients. Everyone’s underwriting inputs are different, and you have to account for that variety of taste. You need to put the right data in the right place for the right person at the right time, which requires a level of curation. You don’t want anyone sticking their grubby fingers into the ingredients they’re not meant to be using for the meal they’re cooking. You don’t want anyone randomly altering data they’re not meant to be examining for the risk currently simmering in front of them on the hotplate.

You cannot have anyone underwriting English risks who ought to be focussed on French ones, let alone on Indian fare. And you certainly don’t want the salad chef cooking the steaks. You need built-in authorities to make sure no one is overstepping their reach.

It is beginning to look like a pretty complicated spice rack, but you, dear developer, have hidden all that complexity behind the scenes, with a simple interface to control the display of ingredients available to each user. Get all that right, and you will concoct a perfect repast every time you visit the underwriting counter, fit for even the most discerning risk appetite.