Digitise commercial underwriting to streamline workflows

The process of automating simple tasks has long been delivering time and cost-savings for insurers. But there is still ample scope for organisations to evolve from basic time-saving to effective underwriting decision support that accelerates profitable growth.

In a hardening market still feeling the aftershocks of the COVID-19 pandemic, mid-market commercial insurers are feeling the pressure. There is a pronounced need for efficiency and effectiveness, and an imperative to focus underwriters’ time on opportunities that are aligned to the underwriting strategy, winnable, and with the information required to drive superior underwriting.

Simplistic robotic process automation (RPA) helps eliminate some of the more mundane administrative tasks but insurers can experience a step change in their decision-making process if they allow for a more sophisticated approach. Automation that helps digitise submission intake, routes workflows to the right underwriter every time, and identifies the most profitable risks has the potential to deliver stronger revenue performance and potential new avenues for growth.

Intelligent Insurer caught up with Juan de Castro, chief operating and commercial officer at Cytora, to find out how automation technologies are able to help underwriters refocus intellectual capital on risk and customer experience, supporting faster, more effective decisions.

This article is published ahead of the Intelligent Insurer webinar “ Digitise commercial underwriting to streamline workflows”, on May 27, 2021.

What are the top challenges around efficiency facing insurers today?
The mechanics of how risk is transferred from a client to the insurer is very manual. There tends to be a lack of information, which results in the underwriters having to do a lot of work just to understand the scope of the risk.

Although it seems that everything is becoming more digital, the risk itself is not presented in a digital format yet. For example, data tends to be buried in a PDF attached to an email. How are we to think about digitising the representation of risk as soon as a submission is received, in order to make better decisions and allow underwriters to be much more focused on analysis.

In what way can automation help underwriters manage their workflows better?
There is a huge problem today around whether a risk will be in-appetite for an insurer. It’s an even bigger pain point in a hardening market. Underwriters can find themselves flooded with opportunities they would not be willing to quote for, simply because of the time it takes to reach each individual decision.

Underwriters can easily spend over 40 percent of their time analysing risks that will not result in a winnable quote. And even for those who are willing to proceed to quote, they have no intelligent way of prioritising the work so they can know which piece of business will enhance their portfolio. It frequently ends up being done on the basis of first in, first out.

How can we make sure we are allocating resources in the most intelligent way?
Even after you’ve understood the risk, and gathered a richer risk profile, underwriting knowledge is so specialised, particularly in the mid-market commercial segment, that you want to make sure you’re assigning the right underwriter. Done manually, this means an experienced underwriter allocating tasks but even then it can be hard to know if their chosen executive has the capacity to work on it.

Technology can understand the task at a much more granular level, and then put the opportunity to the underwriter with the best chances of converting.

In what way can adding automation contribute to the overall health of the organisation?
Insurers will see how the life of the underwriter changes when there is digital risk-processing technology in place. They are moving from the context where underwriters are spending a lot of time unearthing details of risk to the scenario where they are working only on winnable opportunities that are ready to be underwritten.

Then, they have enough time freed up to be able to build stronger relationships with brokers which, in itself, is a driver of getting more and better opportunities and increases the chance of converting existing ones.

It’s also a growth driver. There is much more visibility over the stream of risks coming into the organisation. It allows the business to identify trends in the market and opportunities for product development and perhaps an expanded risk appetite. This session is very much about finding growth-oriented opportunities and takes viewers from theory to implementation.

With digital risk processing technology everybody wins: underwriters’ day-to-day is more rewarding, insurers accelerate profitable growth, and brokers receive superior service.

Juan de Castro will be speaking at Intelligent Insurer’s Commercial Lines Innovation USA Virtual Event (May 18 to 20). The event is free to attend for insurers and brokers/agents, but you must register in advance. Sign up to access the content live and on demand here.