A customer wants an insurance policy. An adviser wants to recommend one. Between them sits a familiar little obstacle: the same information, requested again. Martin Werth spent years in the business before founding UnderwriteMe in 2012 to tackle that repetition. A single application, connected to several insurers, would let advisers compare underwritten prices without starting the conversation from scratch each time.
It is a modest proposition to put beside the usual promises of technology. Nobody gets a flying car. Somebody gets an afternoon back. For Werth, the important consequence was what an adviser could do with the recovered time: discuss the cover, explain the differences and help a customer make a choice.
His career is interesting precisely because he knew the machinery from the inside. He had worked in reinsurance, helped establish an insurer and led it. When he turned to software, he brought an unusually practical grievance. The customer had one purchase to make. The industry had arranged several separate journeys.
01 An insider changes seats
Werth spent more than 20 years at Munich Re. By the time he left in 2006, his experience included business development. He joined Fortis that October to examine opportunities in the UK life insurance market. The assignment placed him at the beginning of another business, with the chance to decide how it would work.
Fortis Life launched in 2008. Werth became its managing director; the business subsequently took the Ageas Protect name. In 2009, its Your Life Plan and Real Life Cover products won the ifs Financial Innovation award for most effective insurance initiative or new product. The company marked the award with an offer of additional commission on cases completed immediately through its online platform.
That detail gives the later UnderwriteMe story some continuity. Even at Fortis, the commercial incentive was attached to getting an application through the system. Products mattered, and so did the route by which a person could actually buy them. A good proposition still needed a workable front door.
By 2012, Werth was building UnderwriteMe with Pacific Life Re backing. He had moved from leading one provider to trying to connect several. It was a different kind of persuasion. An insurer could change its own process. A shared application needed other organisations to see enough benefit to join.
One conversation. More places to go.
02 The telephone test
In 2014, Werth described research UnderwriteMe had conducted among people registered for an industry conference. It was a small exercise, with 132 submissions. Participants could enter a draw for an iPhone 6, a suitably contemporary inducement to talk about an industry whose processes he wanted to modernise.
Sixty per cent of advisers said they typically contacted two or more insurers before making a recommendation. Meanwhile, 62 per cent of insurer respondents believed advisers relied on a quick quote. The two sides appeared to have rather different pictures of the same working day.
The finding mattered to Werth’s argument. If you imagined an adviser simply looking up a price, a shared application might look like a convenience. If you imagined repeated calls before a recommendation could be made, the value became easier to understand. Someone was already doing the coordination. Much of it was happening by telephone.
The work behind the quote
The survey also challenged Werth’s own expectation. He had thought the work involved might make protection less profitable for advisers than other products. Yet 53 per cent said it was more or significantly more profitable. He made room for the surprise in his account. Experience had supplied a hypothesis; asking people had supplied a correction.
That willingness to question familiar assumptions also appeared in his views on financial education. In 2014, he argued that young people needed to understand uncertainty alongside budgeting and saving. Rent, a mortgage and family responsibilities would bring decisions that arithmetic alone could not settle. He wanted preparation for the choices, as well as knowledge of the products.
03 A company needs company
UnderwriteMe’s technology began operating with UK providers in 2014. Exeter Family Friendly, Scottish Provident, Scottish Friendly and SunLife were among the early names associated with the rollout. The proposition connected an application process to insurers’ underwriting engines, allowing comparisons of prices and benefits at the point of sale.
Werth wanted the resulting conversation to cover more than the lowest initial number. In an interview that spring, he argued for competition that looked beyond price. A clearer process could give advisers more time to consider differences in cover. His competitive argument was about making those differences easier to discuss.
“We are trying to move away from price, which dominates.”
Martin Werth, 2014
The comparison service launched in 2015, with LifeSearch and Cavendish named as early distributors. LifeSearch’s Tom Baigrie shared Werth’s frustration with the existing quotation process. Those relationships mattered: a platform needed people who would use it with customers, alongside providers willing to supply terms.
Werth was also assembling a team. Phil Jeynes joined in January 2015 to lead sales and marketing, bringing experience from VitalityLife. Warren Copp became non-executive chair in 2017, with an international underwriting background at Pacific Life Re. The work required commercial relationships and operational knowledge as well as software.
In 2018, Julie Evans arrived as chief operating officer after technology leadership roles at Aviva and Barclays. Her responsibilities included implementation, customer support and product management. These are the jobs that make a software promise hold up on an ordinary working day, when a customer needs help and a distributor expects a response.
By April 2019, Werth was reporting almost 1,000 “buy now” decisions a day. He said a new customer journey could compare fully underwritten terms across nine insurers in ten minutes. Those were company-reported figures from that period, but they made the ambition tangible: fewer separate steps between a conversation and a decision.
04 Knowing when to hand over
UnderwriteMe became wholly owned by Pacific Life Re in 2017. It also launched in Asia that year with Singapore Life. The business had taken Werth’s original application problem beyond the UK, bringing a growing set of relationships and requirements with it.
Early in 2020, HSBC Life put UnderwriteMe’s rules engine into use through a project involving OPAL. The implementation took just over three months. Werth’s explanation returned to the sales process and the need to simplify it. The company was developing, but the central complaint remained recognisable.
Then, in February, he announced that he would step down as chief executive at the end of March. James Tait, already a non-executive director and head of protection for Pacific Life Re Europe, would take over. Werth would become a non-executive director and remain involved.
He called it a difficult decision. “The best time to step down is following a record-breaking year,” he said. He pointed to the management team the business had built and to Tait’s suitability for its next stage. There is a practical generosity in that explanation: the next chapter could belong to a colleague.
The company continued developing after the handover, entering the US in 2022. Its current history records 12 markets and more than 30 insurer clients. Those are figures for the business today, rather than a personal scorecard for its founder. A company’s life becomes a collective undertaking remarkably quickly.
05 The family pitch committee
Werth is now Chief Executive and Co-Founder of a.genius. A public fundraising account he shared in 2024 offers a more domestic view of an experienced entrepreneur getting an idea across. Cold emails and connection requests had produced little response, he wrote. Introductions through people he knew had worked much better.
Then came the one-minute competition pitch. His wife and son thought his first recording looked too serious. His wife filmed a better version. His daughter queried the tracksuit trousers. An investor may scrutinise a business model; a family can cover the entire presentation.
He also described a six-minute angel pitch in Leeds, with plenty of information to fit into the allotted time. His assessment of the constraint was brief: “Fortunately, I’m a fast talker!” After so much of his working life spent reducing other people’s repetition, he was being asked to edit himself.
His company biography supplies other interests: badminton, table tennis and a fondness for Italian holidays, food, wine and cars. He has three children and is a grandfather. The family sporting hierarchy is specific. He can still beat his children at badminton, the biography says, although table tennis has slipped away.
These details make a useful companion to the corporate dates. There is the actuary who has spent years thinking about decisions, and there is the father whose children have views on his video. Both have to make a case to an audience capable of answering back.
UnderwriteMe gave his working argument a durable form. Ask for the information once. Let several providers respond. Leave more time for the conversation that helps someone choose. It took years, colleagues and cooperating companies to make that short instruction usable. Werth’s career gives the small act of asking again its proper weight.