The term underwriting is credited to renowned Lloyd’s of London. In the early days of Lloyd’s, this term meant an acceptance of a part or entire risk of an event in exchange for a premium.
Since then, the term has evolved with ever-changing circumstances. Insurance underwriting has always relied on data to make decisions. To be in sync with today’s fast-paced and volatile world, underwriting is once again on the cusp of change. The entire insurance industry —customer expectations, products, competition, distribution channels, analytics and data technology — is rapidly changing. The most impactful shift in the industry has been the move into the digital age as information has become publicly available via online sources. In order to walk hand in glove with clients, carriers need to develop at a faster rate than their customers.
Underwriters are regularly thrown vast amounts of data to inspect, which eats up their time and leaves room for human error. Today’s highly commoditized market, pricing and service are the only differentiators that help underwriters come out ahead of their competition, so they need to be quick.
Moreover, traditional commercial insurance underwriting is an extremely time-consuming, hands-on process. Business owners looking to purchase insurance may not be completely forthcoming about their associated risk, leaving insurance providers in the dark. That saddles the underwriter with the detective work; underwriters are forced to leverage disparate resources to paint an accurate depiction of risk.
Another layer of complication for underwriters is our world of instant gratification where people are used to immediate answers from tech giants like Google and Amazon. This expectation translates to business, too, in that data is expected to be complete, accurate and provided in real time. To remain competitive, underwriters need to respond quickly while maintaining their diligent level of accuracy.
There are many resources that can be used to verify data, but it’s unreasonable to perform these validations without an automated process. All these pressures can weigh on underwriters, causing burnout, low morale or worse, resignations.
Before that pressure becomes insurmountable, companies must spark a change. As an industry, we need to be empowering underwriters with artificial intelligence (AI) that will find the relevant information they then review. Not only does this reduce human error; it enhances fraud detection and enables higher accuracy profiling.
For example, Plank’s artificial intelligence solution accurately captures billions of data points from online sources and organizes it into actionable insights using machine learning, with simply a business name and address. Machine learning is also able to uncover new risk factors and insights such as the material that was used for flooring by a restaurant from analyzing a new photo uploaded on social media. This insight creates efficiency and a robust predictive capability that offers carriers a significant advantage, allowing them to pick and choose prospects based on their custom risk appetite.
Underwriting brings with it a multifold approach to a variety of tasks that AI can assist with every step of the way, including:
With these supports in place, underwriters spend less time per account as well as less time quoting bad leads. This allows them to better service more accounts and write more new business.
It is also imperative to point out that AI is a tool created with the purpose of enabling underwriters a clearer path to success. As with any new technology, companies will need to address the benefits during the implementation stage. Making sure underwriters see the technology as support instead of a threat can smooth over any trepidations of introducing a new methodology. AI does not do the actual underwriting but rather automates the gathering and validating of data and streamlines processes. If there is an anomaly, the underwriter is further empowered to explore as only underwriters can.
Maintaining a determined drive to foster change throughout an organization helps in deploying new technology when it becomes available. With only a few days of focused training, underwriters have been able to adopt these technologies for their benefit.
The outcome of properly embracing AI in the insurance process is boosting submission-to-quote speed, reducing loss rations, creating better pricing models and more. This benefit is passed onto the end customer as faster and more competitive quotes paired with accurate claims to detect risk and help prevent or cover it.
At the end of the day, it affords underwriters the power to work faster, armed with all the information they need at their fingertips.
Planck CEO and Co-Founder Elad Tsur is a serial entrepreneur who is passionate about bridging the gap between technology and business. These opinions are the author’s own.
