Supercharging Underwriting

As the bedrock of insurance, this capability has gone through a huge transformation over the past 10 years, and over the next 10 years this looks likely to accelerate!

At this time last week I was delighted to join an impressive panel to discuss “Hidden Underwriting opportunities that can supercharge your business”, expertly chaired by Jesper Palmborg of Insurtech Insights. This generated an awful lot of potential...

Naturally, the main thrust of our discussion was focused on how insurers can further embrace new technologies to drive greater efficiencies, growth and customer outcomes.

Underwriters are continually looking to enhance, re-shape and streamline their ways of working and with the adoption of Artificial Intelligence (#AI ) & AutoML this is enabling them to harmonise data, forecast models, identify fraud patterns, and implement operational improvements.

What is clear, is that the successful underwriter of the future will need to be ever adaptable and employ the right tools in a timely manner, continuously evolving and optimising their craft and subsequently the insurers performance.

The “star-gaze” question that was posed in our session was whether underwriting and pricing can be completely digitised? The consensus was that the human underwriter will still very much play a vital part of the mix. Whilst AI will allow for the eradication of more mundane tasks and provide the ability to orchestrate date to price with much greater precision, the (experienced and ethical) decision making will be one that remains with the human.

Almost immediately though the panel referred to the elephant in the room that is legacy technology. This was seen as a massive constraint limiting or eliminating innovation in underwriting (and across the business) and constraining underwriters from adopting new data sources (real-time) adapting models rapidly into products and driving improved combined ratios. From thought to output things remained slow and expensive and the model needs top change.

Whilst #Tech will not always be the answer, it clear that employing the right tech-stack will be key to harnessing future and this is where EIS and the ‘insurers of the future’ will leverage (the EIS platform) key value drivers including;

1. With a Cloud Native platform able to leverage on-demand, scalable and secure infrastructure to optimise Data orchestration
2. Event-Based Architecture fuelling real-time digital experiences
3. API-first openness enabling ecosystems and future-looking development, including test & learn techniques
4. Customer-first approach which offers a 360° view across LOBs

What’s clear from the discussion is the digital twin of underwriter and machine it a potentially powerful one, but that this needs to be developed within a much-improved ecosystem. Allowing for the underwriters to adopt and adapt using technology and data, and drive outcomes into better risk outcomes, driving new products, improved customer experiences (#CX ) and embracing new growth potential in embedded, risk removing and highly adaptive new business models.

To watch the webinar in full please use this link: - https://www.bigmarker.com/insurtech-insights/The-hidden-opportunity-in-pricing-losing-you-customers?show_live_page=true