The courage to implement change

Despite the worrying state of the global economy, and threats to geopolitical stability, the insurance sector still sees a wealth of opportunity from partnering with individuals and organisations in the management of risk. But those risks are changing, and the world is moving fast.

To take advantage of the opportunities in the marketplace, underwriters need to be liberated to use their skills and intuition to make the best calls but, all too often, they’re hidebound by process and outdated workflows. The technology exists today that can reduce much of the burden on underwriters, but it is still underused in most organisations.

In the upcoming webinar titled “The Courage to Implement Change: What Underwriters Can Do to Prepare For The Future”, Send’s Chief Revenue Officer, Adam Cherubini (pictured), will reveal why underwriters experience frustration in their daily duties, and how they can achieve greater clarity on their goals and expand their ability to serve the customer. By getting back to doing more of what they love, they are the key ingredient in a future-facing, growth-focused insurance organisation.

Intelligent Insurer spoke to Cherubini ahead of the webinar to find out why underwriters and their employers should be looking at overhauling their process today, and what it means in terms of delivering a competitive advantage.

Why do underwriters need to be courageous, and why now?

The single biggest competitive advantage a company can have is the depth, breadth and speed of its underwriting department—how they can evaluate risk and do it faster and more consistently than any of their competitors. And yet, the industry has underinvested in underwriting.

If companies make the investment they can create more speed and consistency, and they can start to self-select the risks they want to write, creating adverse selection for their competitors and winning the market. So, do you double down on the processes you have today, or do you seek other solutions?

What signs are you seeing that organisations are taking positive steps to ensure their place at the front?

The sheer volume of enquiries we’re seeing and the types of questions we’re getting reveal that businesses are being very thoughtful about what this function achieves, or how do we arm these individuals to be better at what they do.

Despite the growth of artificial intelligence (AI), our belief is that the human underwriter is going to play an enormous role in the execution and transaction of insurance. There will be certain pieces of the ecosystem that will be chipped away at by automation such as algorithmically underwritten lines of business, personal, auto or home.

The thrust of what we’re saying is that we want underwriters to be empowered in a way they haven’t been in the past.

This inevitably means some kind of organisational or culture change. Has it met with resistance?

We do get some of the headwinds. It’s asking people to operate in a new environment when, potentially, we could just kick the can down the road and do this later. Maybe there will be a pinch point where the company must adapt. But there are new entrants today showing what a fully functioning underwriting department that uses modern technology can look like and how powerful it can be.

It’s waking others up to the fact that, if we don’t make these investments today, we will be left behind.

How do we make change palatable?

Change is always difficult and the way I usually characterise it is: “don’t boil the ocean”. Everything doesn’t have to be done on day one. Let’s instead get some meaningful quick wins through some kind of minimum viable product (MVP) deployment and get underwriters to feel the value of that change. Then we can iterate and implement more modules with greater sophistication. Walk before we run before we sprint.

Similarly, if it’s a top-down mandate, it feels harder than if we try to get buy-in from the underwriting group. We can have conversations with them that say: “if you could change the world tomorrow and have your day look different, what would you change? Something that isn’t core to what you do but is taking up some of your bandwidth?”.

If you can solve that you get their commitment and you can marry that to change agents elsewhere in the company.

What other reasons make it vital to refresh underwriting process?

It’s a measuring stick for evaluating your organisation as a potential employee. If you have old, clunky processes, someone born in a different generational era may look at it and say: “it works for you, but I don’t want to be undervalued in my working environment. My output will be constrained with all this process”.

Evolving regulation is also big one. Underwriters need to stay up to date and be able to conduct due diligence and evidence compliance easily, which can be time-consuming.

There’s a two-fold benefit to refreshing the process. On the one hand, it makes your business attractive to new underwriters and on the other, maybe you don’t need to hire so many in the first place. Historically, as the business has grown, you stack more people onto the underwriting function, and it becomes ineffective over time because you’re operating a low margin business. Tech also becomes an expense ratio lever.

What do you hope attendees will take away from this webinar?

If they did an honest evaluation when they assess how they do business today from submission to bind, and the level of sophistication they’ve empowered their underwriters with, do they really think that they would be considered industry-leading? That their underwriting is a competitive advantage? Or perhaps, do they feel a little sheepish about how they’re doing? Is what they’re doing scalable, and will it attract the best talent?

I suspect there will be several companies that would say that if they did scrutinise their business that way, they’d realise there was some investment that needs to be made.

I hope people come away ready to have a thoughtful conversation about underwriting workflows, and whether they’re arming their underwriters with the data, process and workflows that allow them to be best of breed. If not, what does an industry-leading solution look like?

Join us on 24 May at 11am EST/4pm BST for the webinar Courage to Implement Change: What Underwriters Can Do To Prepare For The Future: https://www.brighttalk.com/webcast/16535/579759?utm_source=NewtonMedia&utm_medium=brighttalk&utm_campaign=579759

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