At a glance: how Foundation Risk Partners drove 300 bps of EBITDA uplift with Microsoft AI
Client Profile
Customer Name: Foundation Risk Partners
Employees: 3,000+
Sector: Insurance brokerage
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The client
Foundation Risk Partners (FRP) is one of the fastest growing insurance brokerages in the United States, with 3,000+ employees across 68 locations, 26% annual growth, and over 200 successfully integrated agencies. Founded in 2017 and backed by Partners Group, FRP serves the US upper middle market across commercial lines, property and casualty, employee benefits, and financial services.
The challenge
Between 2017 and 2023, while most insurance roll-ups were aggregating agencies and bolting legacy systems together, FRP spent six years standardising and normalising policy-level data across every acquisition, building a clean, proprietary data asset. By 2023, the question many insurance leaders are now facing applied to FRP: how do you turn a clean data foundation into measurable business value at scale, when your core business is selling insurance, not building technology?
The solution
FRP partnered with Version 1 as a strategic delivery partner to identify, build, and deploy AI use cases across the business. Version 1 was chosen not as a vendor but as a partner who understood FRP’s business problems and could design solutions that scale across multiple use cases. Version 1’s role extends beyond AI to include Microsoft well-architected frameworks, governance, and managed services across the Azure environment and the broader Microsoft product stack.
FRP is a Microsoft-first organisation. Their internal AI assistant, AskFRP, runs on Microsoft Copilot Studio, and they are deploying Copilot agents for knowledge management and process automation. Staying native within the Microsoft stack gave FRP better economics, a unified security envelope, and the ability to scale AI capabilities without rebuilding infrastructure. Version 1 also brought its own partnership with Credo AI into the relationship, providing FRP with enterprise-grade AI governance and regulatory compliance across their 50-state regulatory environment without the need to build a large internal compliance team.
The results
On the revenue side, Version 1’s AI Labs built an AI-powered gap and wedge analysis tool that reduced cycle times by up to 94% (from 40 hours to 4 hours for gap analysis, and from 4 hours to 15 minutes for wedge analysis) and has been proven to double close ratios. Since launch in July 2024, the tool has generated $3.9 million in new revenue with roughly $1.7 million in EBITDA contribution and over $10 million in estimated pipeline.
On the operational side, automated policy checking has eliminated $2.5 million in BPO outsourcing costs, and FRP plans to significantly reduce all BPO arrangements by 2027. The broader OneFRP platform now includes live sub-agents and tools covering producer toolbox access, benchmarking, loss run analysis, deductible modelling, and automated statement of value generation.
The combined programme represents more than 300 bps of EBITDA uplift: $2 million from business process transformation and $8 million from business performance transformation. All delivered by a seven-person internal team augmented by Version 1, built on the Microsoft technology stack, with concept to production achieved in 14 weeks on the first use case.
What we’ve been able to accomplish, we accomplished together with Version 1. We run a very lean team. We rely heavily on Version 1 as an interactive thought partner.
John Turner, COO, Foundation Risk Partners
Version 1 came back to us with a more complete picture. They came back with a strategy focused on how you create a solution that you could scale across multiple business cases. Ultimately, we chose them because they understood our business problems.”
Richard Dinan, CIO, Foundation Risk Partners
What comes next
FRP is building towards becoming the single source for middle market risk in the United States, using AI and proprietary data to create bidirectional value for clients and carrier partners. For insurance leaders weighing their own AI strategies, FRP’s experience shows that the decisions you make now about data foundations, technology partnerships, and governance frameworks will determine your competitive position for the next decade. FRP made those decisions in 2017 and is reaping the returns today.