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Insurance Underwriting Automation: A Solutions and Strategy Guide

Underwriting automation and submissions

INDICO RESOURCE

F50 Insurance company achieves 300% return on investment with Indico Data

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Wanted: Automated submission intake to streamline insurance underwriting

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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Understanding the insurance submission challenge

Today the process of handling insurance broker submissions is highly manual and prone to errors.

A submission comes in via email and has to be read by a knowledge worker in order to triage it. The associate extracts pertinent data for input to a downstream underwriting system. The same process applies to any attachments, which can be numerous: ACORD forms, loss-run reports, spreadsheets, custom forms, perhaps photos and more.

It’s a labor-intensive, time-consuming process. And let’s face it,– sifting through piles of documents is not exactly rewarding work for your associates, either.

Plus, your time to bind suffers. You’re not turning around quotes nearly as fast as customers expect, or as quickly as more nimble competitors.

Related content: How to automate the insurance submissions intake process and drive new premium growth

New demands on insurance underwriting automation

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

Automated insurance underwriting and submissions

An intelligent intake platform can bring much-needed change to the underwriting process. The platform enables companies to quickly and painlessly build software models, or bots, that perform various functions.

Reading emails: A model can be trained to “read” insurance submission emails, for example, and extract relevant data such as names and dates. Using artificial intelligence technology, the model can also determine context from the body of the email, such as whether it’s a net-new policy request or a renewal.

Sorting attachments: Similarly, intelligent intake models can extract and examine any attachments to the email. Models can unbundle the attachment into discrete documents, categorize each and extract key data from it, all contributing to insurance underwriting automation .

Data entry: After extracting data from emails and attachments, the intelligent data platform then converts the data to a structured format that can be integrated into downstream systems such as Duck Creek and Guidewire for:
• Data enrichment, via third-party data sources
• Risk analysis, including use of AI-based decisioning tools
• Underwriting processing

This is the kind of underwriting process automation analysts say is crucial for insurance companies today.

“Investments in new technologies are the best way to facilitate market access, risk selection and management, quality financial information and customer service capabilities.” PWC, TOP INSURANCE INDUSTRY ISSUES IN 2022.

Underwriting automation: Net results

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

Automation means increased profit – and customer satisfaction

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:

“As machine learning, virtual reality, and other digital advances increasingly automate the underwriting function, more evolved underwriters can take advantage of technology and newly developed skill sets to become more valuable to both their clients and employers. Leveraging real-time data, industry insights, and market-sensing capabilities, they could be better equipped to not just help customers manage risk, but also provide insight on how to avoid and prevent exposures.”
THE RISE OF THE EXPONENTIAL UNDERWRITER, DELOITTE, FEB. 24, 2021.

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