Underwriting agency Blue Zebra is exploring options to expand in the UK market.

The acquisition by British independent broker Ardonagh Group of Blue Zebra stakeholder Envest has opened opportunities there, Chief Technology Officer Amar Roomi tells insuranceNEWS.com.au.

Mr Roomi visited London as part of the Insurtech Australia contingent in recent weeks.

“We’re starting to look at the overseas market,” he said. “We’ve been doing a bit of work to launch our platform in the UK. We’ll be following up with Ardonagh – they’re a major shareholder, so that opens opportunities.”

Blue Zebra, which has a team of 30 technical staff and underwrites more than $300 million in premium, this year strengthened its cybersecurity by deploying Microsoft Sentinel. 

It worked with Microsoft to reduce cybersecurity incident response times by 25% and halve resolution times with a dashboard that oversees and centralises threat management activity and protects sensitive data.

“It brings together all our telemetry, so all the signals that we can get from various components of our cyber footprint ... it pools all that information together into one space,” Mr Roomi said. “Previous solutions compartmentalised it – we didn’t necessarily have that mesh view of everything.”

He says Sentinel “effectively helps us automate not only the visibility of an issue, but also our response. That’s kind of the key.

"It’s one thing to say we’ve got lots of data and we’re capturing all this information from a cybersecurity perspective, it’s quite another to say we’ve come up with an intelligent way to smartly address those issues, even in some ways automatically as well. That’s the power of the tool for us.”