Richard Hartley, CEO: Cytora: Transforming risk in insurance: lessons from Cytora’s journey (373)

In this episode, Matthew is joined once again by Richard Hartley to reflect on a major milestone in Cytora’s journey: its acquisition by US-based Applied Systems.

But as Richard makes clear, this isn’t the end of the road. It’s a platform for scale. Listeners will hear how Cytora evolved from tackling political risk to transforming how risk flows through commercial insurance. Richard shares practical lessons from scaling into the US, explains why they rebuilt their platform around large language models and outlines why being agnostic to input but opinionated on risk output is a game changer.

They also explore the cultural and technical alignment with Applied, the value of blending insurance expertise with external product thinking and what it really takes to make hard pivots, including knowing when to throw away what you’ve built.

In this episode, Richard shares:

• Why Cytora rebuilt its platform around large language models — and what they threw away to make it work
• How “decision-ready risk” became a guiding principle for digitising insurance workflows
• What it really takes to expand into the US and earn client credibility market by market
• Why the idea of industry-wide standardisation is flawed — and how to work around it
• How to lead through uncertainty, scale a team and make tough product decisions
• Why insurance needs both deep domain knowledge and external perspective to innovate
• The underrated role of resilience in entrepreneurship — and what ballet and rugby taught him about pushing through

If you like what you’re hearing, please leave us a review on whichever platform you use or contact Richard Hartley or Matthew Grant on LinkedIn.

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Continuing Professional Development

This InsTech Podcast Episode is accredited by the Chartered Insurance Institute (CII). By listening, you can claim up to 0.5 hours towards your CPD scheme.

By the end of this podcast, you should be able to meet the following Learning Objectives:

• Describe how unstructured data enters the insurance value chain and the implications for underwriting workflows.
• Define the concept of “decision-ready risk” and its role in modernising commercial insurance operations.
• List the key factors that enabled Cytora’s successful expansion into the US market.

If your organisation is a member of InsTech and you would like to receive a quarterly summary of the CPD hours you have earned, visit the Episode 373 page of the InsTech website or email [e-mail] to let us know you have listened to this podcast.

To help us measure the impact of the learning, we would be grateful if you would take a minute to complete a quick feedback survey.