Introduction
Building the model is no longer the hard part of insurance AI. The hard part now is getting underwriters and carriers to actually adopt it. Josh Hollander sits down with Roger Ferrandis, Head of Partnerships at Sixfold, whose AI now runs inside carriers like Zurich, Guardian, and Skyward Specialty, to talk about how trust actually gets built: proof-of-concept by proof-of-concept, underwriter by underwriter, and market by market through partners who already have the relationships.
Guest Bio
Roger Ferrandis is Head of Partnerships at Sixfold, the AI underwriting platform. Originally from Spain, he spent seven years in the UK, where he co-founded WeAnalyze, an underwriting data startup he helped grow to 25 employees, $3 million raised, and clients on three continents before it pivoted to banking. He chose insurance over banking, moved to New York, and now runs Sixfold's global partner strategy across systems integrators, reinsurers, data providers, and cloud marketplaces.
Key Topics
-Adoption is the product problem now - Leadership teams know they need AI, hand it to someone to evaluate, and that person's reference point is ChatGPT making mistakes, so skepticism is the default starting position.
-How trust gets built in a POC - Sixfold runs known submissions through its AI, compares decisions with the underwriters, feeds their reasoning back into the model, and iterates until 90-95% of outcomes match, which is when confidence flips.
-Amplify, not replace - Sixfold is not chasing full automation; the goal is an underwriter handling four submissions in the time one used to take, with clients choosing their own comfort level on straight-through processing.
-The ROI stack - Clients measure 50% time saved per submission, quote-to-bind up 15%, and gross written premium per underwriter up 30%.
-Partnerships as market entry - Munich Re's Realytix platform, Microsoft's Azure marketplace, Adnovum in Switzerland, and Sollers Consulting in Poland each open doors that direct sales cannot, especially across Europe's twenty-plus selling cultures.
-Build versus buy, honestly argued - Sixfold's model has trained on nothing but underwriting for three years, and Roger's warning to carriers building in-house is that the technology shifts faster than an internal build can keep up with.
-Involve the underwriters - His advice to carrier leadership: do not delegate AI evaluation and hope for the best, because if underwriters do not buy in, nothing happens.
Notable Quotes
"We can sell to C-levels. But if underwriters are not happy with our solution, nothing's going to happen."
"With that iteration, we get to a point where at least ninety or ninety-five percent of the outcomes of the brain are the same outcomes the underwriter will have. When they see that level of accuracy, that's when we gain their confidence."
"If an underwriter used to deal with one submission every hour, we want them to be able to deal with four."
"By the time you build something yourself, the whole technology has changed so much that you need to rebuild it."
Resources
Guest:
Sixfold: https://www.sixfold.ai/
Roger Ferrandis on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rogerferrandis/
Host & Organization:
Joshua R. Hollander on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshuarhollander/
Horton International (USA): https://www.horton-usa.com/
Insurtech Leadership Podcast (LinkedIn Showcase): https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/insurtech-leadership-show
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