From its launch, Westfield Specialty Insurance made an aggressive bet: grow from $30 million in premium to a projected $950 million in four years – without sacrificing underwriting discipline or operational control. For Manoj Jain (pictured), CIO of Westfield Specialty, that mandate meant building for scale from day one, not retrofitting systems after the fact.
“From the very beginning, we focused on scaling underwriting, claims, and operations,” Jain said. The challenge was to launch specialty products quickly while maintaining data accuracy and financial integrity in a fast-growth environment. That tension – speed versus control – has shaped almost every technology and operating decision since.
To support that growth trajectory, Westfield Specialty implemented a cloud-native core system alongside a custom-built, cloud-native platform, all within an agile delivery framework.
That architecture was designed with one clear outcome in mind: compressing product development and launch timelines. “This combination enabled us to launch new products in four to eight weeks,” Jain said, a cadence that would be ambitious for any insurer, let alone a specialty franchise still in its early years.
The impact has been measurable. The technology stack has supported underwriting performance, created operational efficiencies, and underpinned a premium climb from $30 million in the first year to a projected $950 million in year four. For brokers and clients, the payoff is visible in faster access to new coverage offerings and a more consistent experience across policy creation, billing and claims.
“We didn’t want to implement innovation for its own sake,” Jain noted. “We wanted innovation that showed up in our numbers and in how easy we are to do business with.”
For a specialty insurer standing up a full operating platform at speed, effective collaboration was non-negotiable. “You can’t possibly have all the talent in-house,” Jain said. “When you’re trying to move a behemoth or implement a major new system, you need hundreds of people. You can’t keep all of these people long-term.”
Westfield Specialty selected a core system vendor with proven accelerators, a strong delivery track record and deep P&C experience. That was critical to complement internal knowledge of Westfield’s business with practices already tested in the market. Potential solution providers were evaluated on three essential axes: delivery record, scalability, and cultural fit.
Cultural alignment also proved decisive. “It wasn’t a case of saying, ‘Vendor, you go and do your thing while we do ours, and we’ll just hold you accountable,’” Jain explained. “It was very much a joint, one-team effort.”
That collaborative model delivered. Together, Westfield and its vendors implemented a full suite - integrated clearance, policy, claims, billing and a data lake - across 32 products in just 11 months. The program landed 20% ahead of schedule and 25% under budget, while also securing industry innovation awards. For executives across the market, it offers a case study in how disciplined vendor selection and joint execution can reduce the risk of large-scale transformation.
As Westfield Specialty layered artificial intelligence (“AI”) into underwriting, claims and operations, the biggest hurdle was not the technology itself – it was adoption. “Our business people come from different places and are used to different user experiences,” Jain said. With the organisation racing from $30 million to $950 million in premium, the team had to balance business buy-in with the need for speed.
Underwriting, claims and operations teams were heavily dependent on manual processes. Westfield responded by introducing workbenches and workstations, along with AI-driven tools for submissions, loss-run ingestion and risk scoring, built in parallel with the workflows embedded in the core systems.
Through agile pilots and strong governance, Westfield was able to double operational efficiency in early deployments while maintaining compliance and user confidence. Jain is clear that prompts are not the hard part. “Most people use some form of AI today and understand how to get value from it,” he said. “The difficult part is operationalizing AI.”
To ensure new tools landed well with underwriters and claims staff, Westfield Specialty invested heavily in design and validation before any full build. “When we introduce something new, such as workbenches and workstations, the user experience is critical,” Jain said. “Users should be able to understand the interface quickly and move efficiently through it.”
The team starts with interactive mock-ups, often in Figma or similar tools. These prototypes show users exactly what their world would look like - how many clicks a task will take, how quickly they can reach key information, and where friction might arise. Business users provide feedback early and often, and that feedback shapes the build.
For AI, Westfield relies on proofs of concept grounded in real work. If a business unit needs to mark and classify large documents - say, a thousand-page submission where financials sit on page 350 and loss information on page 465 - the AI is tested on those actual documents. The AI results are compared directly with manual processes. Only once the business has seen the evidence of the effectiveness and accuracy of the AI processes and bought in to the new procedures does the team push ahead with broader implementation.
Throughout, Jain stresses that transformation at Westfield Specialty is not an IT-led edict but a shared enterprise effort. “Transformation is a team sport ...You can build something in a silo, but at the end of the day, it’s a house we’re building where the underwriters have to live,” he said. “What’s convenient for us in IT may not be convenient for them.”
The results are showing up not only in product speed - launching new offerings in four to eight weeks, which Jain calls “essentially unheard of” - but also in engagement scores across both IT and business teams.
“And this isn’t a one-and-done situation,” he said. “We didn’t just implement the systems and walk away. We’ve continued that engagement with the business and maintained that collaborative model going forward.”
