As specialty insurers, MGAs and brokers contend with fragmented data, legacy workflows, growing regulatory scrutiny and rising operational complexity, strong data foundations are essential.
At the same time,
Our new Meet the Insurtech Leader series gives you a look into the minds of the executives guiding these tech-forward companies. Insurtech founders and leadership are encouraged to reach out for a potential feature in the series by
What is your name and title?
I am Paul Templar, VIPR Solutions (VIPR) co-founder and CEO. I have a recognized profile as an innovator in insurance-native delegated authority and reinsurance data management. I also have over 20 years of experience in specialty lines and the global reinsurance ecosystem.
At VIPR, I have supported and worked alongside our international engineering team in building a technology firm that transforms how insurers, reinsurers, MGAs and brokers manage their risk, premium and claims data across the entire program business value chain.
My passion is to solve problems and make life easier for the professionals we work with in the specialty insurance market, bridging the gap between inconsistent data, business goals and technology requirements. VIPR is helping organizations modernize their entire data infrastructure, strengthen compliance and unlock actionable data insights that drive better underwriting and operational performance.
At the end of the day, I believe that AI technology should empower people, not replace them. True innovation in insurance comes through collaboration, data transparency and building trust at every level of the value chain.
How did you come into your leadership position?
I didn't set out to run an insurance data company. When I joined VIPR in 2009, I was only its third employee, working under co-founders Rick Brown and Bob Brown who I had previously worked with at Moneynet, a price comparison site from the United Kingdom.
Bob Brown had a Lloyd's broking background at Marsh's North American division and his own brokerage which he later sold, and his contacts in the market kept saying the same thing to him: "You understand technology, we have technology problems. Can you help us?"
That conversation became VIPR. From its beginnings as a London-based start-up in the Lloyd's market, our team of experts successfully built VIPR into a private-equity-backed global scale-up.
What advice would you give to other insurtech leaders, or to yourself 5 years ago?
Something I wish we'd understood earlier at VIPR is that building a successful business is less about having one brilliant idea and more about endurance, consistency and good people. The reality is that growth happens in a messy, non-linear way and in a "relationship business" like insurance, trust takes years to build — but only minutes to lose.
Building an entrepreneurial business requires a lot of emotional resilience. There are long periods where progress feels invisible: you're solving problems that nobody sees, making decisions with incomplete information and carrying responsibility for clients, employees and growth all at the same time.
It's also important to recognize that not every opportunity is a good opportunity. Especially early on, it's tempting to say "yes" to everything because growth feels urgent. Over time, we have learned that focus is one of the most valuable assets a company can have. VIPR became successful because we stayed deeply specialized rather than trying to become everything to everyone.
Another valuable lesson is understanding that culture scales faster than process. The people you hire early on shape the entire trajectory of the business. Technical expertise matters, but mindset matters more. We built VIPR around people who genuinely care about solving client problems and removing market challenges. That creates trust both internally and externally.
We also underestimated how important operational infrastructure would become. Security, governance, compliance and scalability can feel secondary when you're a smaller company, but if you want to work with major global organizations, those foundations are critical. Achieving our Systems and Organizations Control 2 compliance (SOC 2) and building enterprise-grade operational resilience became essential parts of our growth journey.
Finally, I wish I'd worried less about whether insurance technology sounded exciting enough from the outside. Early on, there's a temptation to compare yourself to more visible tech sectors, but over time, I realized that solving meaningful problems in critical industries is far more valuable than chasing trends.
How do you see AI changing insurance over the next 5 years?
We're in a phase where AI, data infrastructure and specialist market expertise are converging in a very powerful way. There's a misconception that AI will commoditize everything, but we actually believe the opposite is true in specialist markets like insurance. As data volumes increase, platforms with deep domain intelligence become exponentially more valuable.
We're particularly excited about how AI can continue to accelerate and transform decision-making across insurance operations. Large global brokers increasingly recognize that their delegated authority operations require specialist platforms designed specifically for their workflows — not generic systems that are adapted to them retrospectively.
Beyond the growth of the company and the business opportunity, what genuinely excites us is the chance to continue modernizing a part of the insurance industry that has historically been underserved by technology.
What is the biggest opportunity for insurtechs over the next 6 months?
In the North American program business market, organizations are facing a critical 12-18 month window to demonstrate AI governance and audit-ready oversight in the face of growing scrutiny from regulators and rating agencies across every state in the U.S. This means specialty insurance lines of business are under growing pressure to modernize data infrastructure to demonstrate operational control across underwriting models.
The reality is that most insurers are still dealing with fragmented data and legacy workflows that were never designed for AI.
AI is creating enormous opportunities for the insurance market, particularly around efficiency, exception handling and data intelligence, but only if firms have the right foundations in place first.
Specialist insurance technology platforms with deep domain intelligence, regulatory logic and proprietary program data will therefore become more valuable, not less, in the AI era.
What is the biggest mistake insurtechs make these days?
The most telling mistake is thinking the model is the moat. It isn't.
Anyone can build technology — and many people have. What you cannot build quickly is the data the model learns from, or the market that trusts you with that data. In this market, being right is not enough; you have to be auditable. New entrants have the models; they do not have the market's network and volume of insights — and that part takes years.
What is your primary line of business?
We have created an insurance native platform, built for insurance data: AI-enabled technology solutions for the delegated authority and program business insurance markets.
What's the origin story of the company?
When Rick and Bob Brown founded VIPR, they invited me to join them as the company's third co-founder.
The VIPR team didn't set out to build a "cool" tech company; they set out to solve a problem that almost nobody outside the insurance sector even knew existed.
Rick Brown and Bob Brown perceived that there was huge variability in the quality of key policy information contained within insurance industry reports. Delegated authority business was still heavily reliant on spreadsheets, manual processing and disconnected systems and workflows simply weren't built for the growing scale, speed and regulation of the Lloyd's market.
With increasing regulatory scrutiny driving an urgent need for insurance businesses to exert greater discipline over their data, they saw an opportunity to standardize and validate the information contained in these reports.
When was VIPR founded?
2009
What pain points is the technology trying to solve?
Within the insurance ecosystem, program business is one of the most operationally complex segments of the market. However, historically, specialty insurance operations were often treated as a back-office necessity rather than a source of competitive advantage.
Bordereaux data management was a highly manual, fragmented and operationally painful procedure. Many firms had simply normalized inefficiency.
VIPR aims to deliver an automated solution to insurers, reinsurer, brokers and MGAs in the delegated authority space that enables them to extract meaningful intelligence in real time, improving performance, oversight, compliance and operational efficiency across their entire portfolio. Our products are specifically designed to address the unique needs of the program market through automating the collection, cleansing and validation of bordereaux data.
Better data insights mean better underwriting outcomes, better governance and ultimately a more resilient insurance market.
A key element of our product development was a pragmatic approach to AI, focusing on how it can solve operational problems, simplify complicated processes, and give clients cleaner data and faster insights that will inform better decision-making, making their lives easier.
What's ahead?
VIPR's mission is to continue expanding into new markets globally while strengthening our position at the heart of the delegated authority and program insurance ecosystem. On the development front, we will accelerate and extend our product offering where it makes sense as the market rapidly changes, with a particular focus on AI-enabled data intelligence, automation and oversight.
As insurers, brokers and MGAs face growing volumes of data, regulatory scrutiny and operational complexity, we see a significant opportunity to help them build stronger foundations for growth. Our focus will remain on solving real market problems, investing in our insurance-native technology and giving clients cleaner data, faster insights and greater control over their portfolios.
How many employees does your company have?
Over 150 employees worldwide.
Where is the company based?
The U.K., the U.S. and Europe.
