When I was 11, I spent the summer trying to solve the Rubik’s Cube. I twisted the thing on the sofa, in front of the telly, at the dining-room table, at my desk, sitting on the floor, in the garden, on a chair, lying on my back… everywhere. I could get the little squares aligned correctly on both sides of one face, making an H, but I couldn’t get the pieces in between to match.

My father occasionally watched my frustration. He had a completed Rubik’s Cube of his own. It sat on his desk, and I wasn’t allowed to disturb it, but he’d procured a second one for me after I asked about the thing.

Finally, after hours of fruitless rotation, he gave me some advice.

“You need to try a different approach, Guillaume,” he said. “Your moves are correct, but your starting point is all wrong. You need to stop insisting on the H. Go back to the beginning. Try the Daisy.”

I made a daisy pattern as he showed me, then twirled some more – a lot more – until eventually my cube had six monochrome faces. The challenge mastered, I positioned the cube on my own desk, and never touched it again.

For those of us in insurance technology, it’s the new approach that’s important. I’d become stuck in a rut, and no matter what I tried, I wasn’t going to get where I wanted to be. Not from where I had begun. I had to change something earlier in the process.

In underwriting, for a few years now, tech driven MGAs (call them insurTechs, if we must) have set about starting from somewhere different.

A couple of examples of this approach were announced this week. One was by DLT Alert, a tech shop out of New York which provides embedded warranties for cyber security companies.

In short, if the warranty-granting company’s clients’ digital suppliers suffer a cyber breach, the clients get a parametric warranty payment. Underwriting is supported by DLT’s ‘Cyra’ platform, which assesses the suppliers down the line. The capital for the venture comes through the Miami wholesaler LIRG, and originates with innovative reinsurance capital providers who are looking to support new ways of transferring risk. Together they’ve identified a new coverage gap, and closed it.

That’s fair enough for new risks like the digital supply chain, I hear you cry, but such tech-enabled underwriting could never work for old risks, or in traditional markets like Lloyd’s. They have systems that work, and processes which are entrenched. They cannot change their starting point, because it’s integral to how they operate.

Think again. It’s time to take those old, perfected approaches off their perch and examine them afresh.

This week’s announcement of another new MGA proves it can be done. Ceto (there’s currently a run on four-letter Greek c-names) is a new coverholder just launched by the Lloyd’s managing agencies Chaucer and TM Kiln, plus Ceto AI, a tech firm. The latter has developed a platform which collects real-time monitoring data from vessels’ onboard machinery, and calculates predictive performance insights based on what it learns. Basically, it’s telematics for ships.

The innovation on the underwriting side is to augment periodic surveys, the fundamental risk-reporting tool of marine underwriting, with live operational data and point-in-time assessments. The information received gives underwriters very much more knowledge about specific risks than ever before. It’s more even than they could imagine.

“With the global fleet now averaging more than 22 years of service, vessel age and other uniform parameters in isolation are an increasingly blunt indicator of risk,” Chaucer says, calling the new approach “a more forward-looking, differentiated approach to risk assessment.”

By stepping back from the survey as the starting point for underwriting, this venture may help marine insurance brokers and buyers to get where they’re going more efficiently.

It’s a colourful new twist on the old underwriting puzzle.

Guillaume Bonnissent is Chief Executive of Quotech.