Broker Insights haas appointed Tom Duke as its new chief operating officer.
He played a key part in the development and ultimate sale of Scottish technology business TVSquared, and has worked with a variety of other tech businesses during a 25-year career.
Now taking on a c-suite role at the Dundee-based insurtech firm, Duke will apply his technical expertise to the operational challenge of ensuring that as the firm grows into new markets, it continues to provide clients with smooth onboarding and user experience.
Its Vision platform, which aims to brings brokers and insurers together, now has more than £2bn gross written premiums in the UK commercial insurance broker market and more than 20% of the British regional broker market.
Broker Insights undertook a Series A funding round in 2021, which led an expansion to 60 people, alongside investment in its data science capabilities and analytics tools.
Chief executive Fraser Edmond said: “Tom arrives at Broker Insights at a crucial time for our company.
“Our expansion into the United States, where we are undertaking a trial, is key to our international business plans.
“Tom’s insight and knowledge of scaling technology companies to prepare for this kind of expansion will be invaluable over the coming years,“ he continued, adding: “His experience at TVSquared in handling cloud-based infrastructure internationally, whilst responding to ever-growing customer demand, will be particularly important.”
As chief information officer of TVSquared, which was acquired by US-based Innovid in February 2022, Duke led on technical strategy and managed teams across the US and EMEA region.
Prior to that, he was the operations director at Brandwatch, and chief technology officer at iBAHN, managing a global team to provide network and video products to the hospitality industry. He has also held senior-level positions at Memex, Orbital Software and Vision Consulting.
“Creating a great product - which Broker Insights has undoubtedly done - is only ever half the battle for technology firms,” explained Duke.
“Platforms like ours need to be capable of handling billions of data points, at high speed, to produce the best outcomes possible for our clients and their customers.
“To do that successfully, while growing the business at pace, you need to build great infrastructure around the product and excellent processes within the organisation.
“That combination of technical and operational challenges is hugely motivating for me, and I have already been impressed by the vision and expertise of my new colleagues at Broker Insights and what they have achieved to date.”
Duke joins Broker Insights following the recent appointment of Dr Artur Niemczewski as a non-executive director.
The company's distribution platform aims to deliver more effective and efficient insurer product distribution to brokers through automation, collaboration tools and real-time data.
It was founded in 2018 by former Aviva senior executives Fraser Edmond and Iain Crole.
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