Technology is at the heart of Admiral’s business. From Cloud through to Devops and Agile delivery, our technology department is an exciting and fast-paced environment to work in.
We recently met up with Mark, our CTO, to find out more.
What is your background?
I’d been working in the banking sector for 23 years before I joined Admiral Tech. I’d enjoyed the digital revolution that took place 5 years ago within the banking sector and the engagement with fintech and reacting to such changes. When I saw this role at Admiral, I saw an opportunity to once again, be at the front of fintech changes required in the insurance space.
What do you do at Admiral Tech?
The digital revolution requires a brand-new strategy and approach to IT; we’re being forced to respond and react using a combination of digital and fintech. It’s about challenging the business to think differently and embrace new things and looking at our products and experience we provide for our customers and how we service customers in the future.
At the moment, I’m looking at what to do about cloud and introducing it in the right way to the business, as well as what we do about DevOps, and making it easy for devs to write great things and quickly push them through to live.
What do you enjoy most about working for Admiral Tech?
The culture here is a big thing, it’s fantastic. Admiral’s been voted the best place to work and it feels like that. Traditionally, insurance companies are hierarchical, but it’s not like that here, things are done for everybody equally and that really appealed to me.
The department is also a really nice environment, it feels more like a family, rather than just a group of people working together.
What do you think really sets Admiral Tech apart from the competition?
Admiral is a big company, but it still operates as a start-up and has a strong sense of trying things out. We were the first online insurance policy provider – we’ve always done new things and still do.
With Admiral’s performance, size and with the unique culture, we’re best placed to take full advantage of digital and be disruptive in the marketplace. The company has enough customers and financial backing to support things properly, but with the freedom to try things out and test things.
Do you think there are lots of opportunities to grow and develop here?
I think I’m quite unique in that I’ve joined Admiral at a certain level. It strikes me that many of the people around me have grown up within the organisation and built their career here. There seems like plenty of opportunities to develop your skills and try new things.
What’s the most exciting project or upcoming change happening within Admiral Tech?
We’ve recently done a day around digital – running experiments and testing things in a small way.
We’re trying to research new products by running such small experiments before we put a lot of resource into bringing products to market. By completing small experiments, we can test certain hypothesis before pouring resource into fully building the products in the first place.
We’ve started some experiments – security cameras bundled with home insurance and car insurance policies online. We’ve realised we can quickly make changes as and when they arise. It’s just something small and simple that tests a hypothesis.
Where do you think Admiral Tech heading?
We don’t fully know the extent of how the insurance market is going to change, so it’s important for Admiral tech to be able to adapt, change and deliver things faster than ever.
Scale up and down to do right things at the right time- cloud, devops and agile.
Do you have any advice for anyone thinking of joining Admiral Tech?
It’s an exciting time to join us and a great opportunity to drive change, that’s why I came here!
Click here to read the story about our Head of Change, Matt
Click here to read the story about Simon, one of our Enterprise Architects
