The world of risk is more complicated than ever, particularly in the commercial lines and specialty markets.
Technological advancements have created new and more complex risk for underwriters to assess and evaluate. Globalisation and greater interconnectedness have increased the likelihood of large-scale events that can have impacts far beyond their geographical bounds, and climate change has increased the frequency and severity of extreme weather and Nat Cat events.
Commercial operations require much greater levels of cover, and policies that can respond to a wider range of events at higher limits. It’s unlikely that one insurer can cover for the entire scope and scale of a fortuitous event, so commercial submissions have become naturally more and more complex as the world of risk evolves.
To meet these requirements, multi-layered risk, or programme business, is common in the market. Commercial and specialty risks require multiple layers of coverage, encompassing several different business lines. Each layer and line of business comes with different cover limits and exclusions, responding to different risks.
Traditional policy administration systems, however, aren’t built to handle this type of complex submission. Originally built for the mid-market, they excel when dealing with the ‘atomic policy’, a single policy, covering a single risk. Using these legacy systems, each layer of the risk must be submitted separately, on a ‘one and done’ basis. As a result, one risk can be represented by multiple policies on a system.
Underwriters under pressure
Policy-level underwriting is therefore the norm in the market, the systems demand it and aren’t geared to allow it any other way. Yet, finding, collating, and assessing each of these individual policies presents a huge manual challenge for busy underwriters. They must comb their systems to ensure they have captured each element of the risk and manually transfer all the details of each layer from one place to another – a practice that can lead to human error, or missing data.
They’re under increasing pressure to generate new business and report better loss ratios, but how can they chase business growth and profitability when they’re spending so much time wrangling their risks from these disparate, yet connected submissions?
Order from chaos
Account-level underwriting presents an efficient alternative to the chaos of the policy-based approach. By working at account-level, commercial and specialty underwriters can consider each risk and the level of exposure that a particular policy presents, with an inherent understanding of the overall risk profile.
The holistic view gives underwriters greater insight into their risk. But without the right system, they can still spend significant amounts of time pulling all of these strands together.
There is a better way
With the Send Underwriting Workbench, we’ve taken a submission-first approach. Using generative AI, our platform can identify when multiple submissions relate to the same account and automatically collate these so that underwriters can see everything they need at-a-glance.
This takes underwriting from atomic to account, enabling underwriters to efficiently manage their whole accounts from one dashboard, without having to manually rekey data from one place to another.
Account-level underwriting gives underwriters the edge in a highly competitive market, helping them to focus on growth with all the data and information they need. We’re committed to supporting them in this practice, offering the tools and technology to bring account-level insight to the underwriters’ fingertips.
If you’d like to find out more or see the platform in action, book a call with us today.
Author: Matt McGrillis. You can connect with Matt on LinkedIn or email: matt.mcgrillis@send.test.betterbrandagency.com.