Automation Accelerates in Small Commercial Lines Underwriting

Over the past few years, insurers reexamined their strategies amid new demands and increasingly digital customer interactions, with underwriting departments, in particular, experiencing waves of changes. Now, new research shows the results of insurers’ efforts in transforming their underwriting businesses, and the small commercial segment is entering a new phase of automation.

SMA’s recently published eBook, “Small Commercial Lines Underwriting Transformation: The Next Level of Automation,” reveals that a small group of insurers have moved their underwriting plans past the modernization of policy admin systems to deploy transformational technologies and innovative underwriting tools. This group likely acknowledged the struggles with transformation during the pandemic and spent the past two years strategizing around innovative initiatives. However, more than half of insurers remain in earlier phases of digital transformation and are not investing heavily in transformational technologies and advanced automation tools.

The initiatives at the top of insurers’ agendas in 2022 include those involving data and analytics, such as pre-fill and scoring, which are being piloted or implemented at nearly all small commercial lines insurance companies. Eighty-nine percent of insurers are also planning or applying automated workflow technologies to their small business operations.

When considering how insurers are leveraging new tech and data, paired with the 83% of executives who expect big changes to small commercial underwriting within the next five years, all signs point to continued momentum toward increased automation in the segment. But now is the time for insurers to create their future roadmap and evaluate the new tech solutions and data-sourcing options in the underwriting space.

Learn more about the current state of underwriting transformation and the path forward for the small commercial lines segment by reading SMA’s new eBook, “Small Commercial Lines Underwriting Transformation: The Next Level of Automation.”