Commercial insurance companies face a twofold challenge when it comes to maximizing automation in insurance underwriting:
• Broker submissions come in faster than insurers can triage and process them
• Companies don’t have the capacity to properly analyze complex submissions to understand whether they represent acceptable risks and opportunities

In conversations with customers, we hear again and again their quote ratios are suffering, with only about 25% of submissions insurance companies receive turning into written policies. Some 60% never get reviewed at all because insurers simply lack sufficient capacity.

The solution is underwriting automation through submission intake automation. Intelligent intake technology helps insurers automate submission intake and triage processes by performing routine tasks faster and more efficiently and accurately than employees can on their own.

Industry experts agree that automated insurance underwriting is a strategic imperative. “Insurers that continue relying on traditional ways of underwriting could start a negative spiral that would be difficult to reverse,” Deloitte says.

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Analysts point to key trends that highlight the need to accelerate underwriting automation.

Deloitte notes a shift from hindsight, meaning looking at only historical data, to foresight, which involves taking advantage of new digital resources and predictive data. Sensors are generating huge volumes of data in real time that can be used for risk assessment and mitigation in everything from automobiles to factory floor machines, for example.

As a result, underwriters are being asked to bring more science to the risk equation, augmenting their own judgment. While the human element will not go away, Deloitte says “Underwriters need to be able to thrive in both realms—as data pioneers and technology trailblazers.”

Related content: How partnerships help drive underwriting transformation and automate the insurance submission process

Using an intelligent intake platform to automate insurance submissions delivers impressive results:

Up to a 70% reduction in manual document handling
Improve quote ratios while giving associates more time to handle exceptions – or to take on more challenging and lucrative work

More accurate decision-making
Increased accuracy in data entry leads to improved underwriting decision-making and loss ratios – and more profit

Accept any kind of data, from any source
Automate data input from custom forms, images, handwritten documents, third-party data enrichment sources, sensor-driven data and more

Automating the submissions intake process is a key step toward the larger goal of digital transformation that is crucial for survival in the insurance business. According to Deloitte, advanced technologies can help underwriters develop new capabilities that make them more valuable to their own organizations as well as to customers: