Decluttering the Underwriter’s Workbench: A Surefire Path to Insurance Wellness

This past year has been tough on insurance. The outlook doesn’t seem much brighter either, and the ripple effects are expected to worsen. While the industry tries to sidestep these impacts, one key area that directly can influence both the costs and the overall financial health of insurance companies is underwriting. How?

Underwriting is a highly specialized and, quite frankly, expensive skill. It’s often described as an art form, and the instincts can only be developed with years of hands-on experience. Despite this, much of an underwriter’s time is consumed by repetitive, mundane tasks—the science behind the art that is ideally suited for automation.

While automation technology has been around for years, promising to ‘revolutionize’ every corner of business operations, a longitudinal study found that the life of underwriters has remained largely unchanged. The potential of automation to free up these skilled professionals to focus on more strategic, high-value tasks has not been fully realized.

Searching for Data in a Deadline-Driven World

Underwriting workbench remains a remarkably outdated, paper-first process. Data needed to assess risk is often buried in PDFs and spreadsheets tucked away in brokers’ emails. Underwriters must go through this fragmented information, moving between documents that are formatted differently depending on the source. That means much of their valuable time is spent rekeying information and other non-core administrative tasks.

For instance, underwriters frequently find themselves toggling through dozens of screens to extract the data required to price a risk. They repetitively rekey the same information into multiple systems, making the underwriting workbench just another cumbersome tab in an overcrowded browser.

This inefficient setup hits hard in two ways. First, new business policies move fast, and being the first to respond often means winning the client. A slow-moving underwriting process, therefore, directly reduces the chances of success. Second, the costs of collecting, gathering, enriching, and augmenting data become exorbitantly high for each submission.

A central challenge contributing to these inefficiencies is a lack of integration between systems—-information and context do not flow into the right systems at the right. Without a unified system, underwriters are left to handle menial tasks instead of value-adding ones like securing new business.

Going Back to the Drawing Board

These challenges cannot be resolved by simply gluing new capabilities into the existing underwriting workbench. We already have plenty of those—many would argue, in fact, too many. To make the underwriters’ day-to-day tasks painless, they need a more unified experience. A platform approach helps by offering: