Transform the future of submissions

Today’s world no longer has patience for prevarication and delay. Middle and large P&C carriers look on with envy as their personal and small commercial lines peers make the most of automated technologies to speed up submissions and make the most of straight-through processing efficiencies.

They needn’t sit on the sidelines, however. Jeff Mason, founder and chief executive officer at Groundspeed Analytics, will explore the future of submissions with attendees at Underwriting Innovation USA. During his session on November 9 at 11.30am EST, he will reveal how the industry is viewing current challenges around submission and what to do about the myriad technologies available promising solutions.

He will discuss how data, technology and human-in-the-loop processes can work together to bring down unfeasibly long quote times, all while building better risk profiles and higher quality outcomes. Mason spoke to Intelligent Insurer ahead of the event.

Why is ‘business as usual’ so challenging in today’s business climate?

Let’s look at commercial insurance in a comprehensive way, based on size of risk and line of business. Each line of business and risk size (small commercial, middle market, large commercial) has its own unique challenges.

While small commercial is largely automated, middle market and large commercial underwriting workflows are almost powered by human effort. This is a considerable opportunity as middle market and large commercial makes up nearly $300 billion in gross written premiums.

In middle market and large commercial, the process is entirely manual, driven by email workflows from brokers that require several days of reading documents, emails, and manual data entry.

Manual data entry and classification methods fail to capture 95 percent of important information along the way, while total end-to-end quote times can stretch into weeks. In small commercial, you can generate a quote in minutes. For the middle market and up, the average time to quote is 45 days.

With all the talk of automation, why should we focus on ‘human-in-the-loop’ too?

There is considerable talk about the transformative power of artificial intelligence (AI)-driven intelligent document processing (IDP). Groundspeed is one of the leaders in advancing this technology. We also understand the high level of accuracy required by our underwriting customers.

IDP can get you very far, but machine learning alone does not get to 99.5 percent accuracy, which is the general accuracy benchmark of underwriting workflows. That is why human-in-the-loop (HITL) workflows are essential. Where and how to use HITL effectively in processes is pivotal to scalability and cost-takeout. Groundspeed is the leader in employing HITL workflows in an AI-augmented process.

Are there any compounding factors driving the trend toward middle and large commercial submission automation?

In a post-pandemic world, insurance company staffing of administrative and analytics roles is very challenging. Insurance carriers throughout the world are facing high attrition rates for these employees, and difficulty in recruiting and hiring.

Automation is no longer a nice-to-have, now it is a need-to-have. If you want to grow or even maintain your written premium, you will need to automate away these manual tasks. This not only creates a scalable submission workflow, it also frees your senior talent from the mundane tasks of transposing data from documents into policy admin systems. Let underwriters underwrite.

With so many potential levers, where should underwriters focus their efforts when it comes to improving submissions?

Every commercial insurance carrier struggles to get data “from the sidewalk into the house”. Once data is inside the front door, for instance in the underwriting ecosystem, our clients tend to feel confident about their ability to underwrite effectively. The struggle rests with how to effectively classify risk, set up and clear the submission, triage and sequence opportunities, and enhance and ingest detailed and accurate risk data.

That’s where Groundspeed focuses: in the setup-clearance-triage-completion-enhancement-ingestion part of the submission workflow. Similarly, we work on the broker side enabling more efficient placement methods to our carrier customers.

Enhancing and completing the information is key to efficient submission workflows. With collaboration from our customers, Groundspeed is building the largest industry-wide data repository used by our data scientists and engineers to augment the power of the data used in your underwriting process.

How can carriers cut through the noise in a busy vendor landscape?

There’s a lot of talk about machine learning, AI, and cognitive document processing. Buyers at insurance companies are probably inundated by lots of different companies who say they can do anything for any problem. But we’d very much like attendees to understand the realm of what’s possible right now—what some specific insurers are doing around those processes and where attendees should invest going forward.

We’ll also be looking at some trends on the other side of the fence, with brokers and broker placement and those workflows that will impact their business 10 years from now. Improving the quality of submissions is a persistent problem that’s been around for 300 years or more. We will try to help attendees understand what is going to make the winners—and losers—in this space today, and in the future.

During his session at Underwriting Innovation USA on November 9 at 11:30am EST, Jeff Mason will explore current challenges around submission and what to do about the myriad technologies available promising solutions, revealing how data models contribute to improved submissions and what getting the human-in-the-loop means to carriers today.

This is the biggest online event tailored specifically to underwriting—don’t miss out. Register now!