E&S Insurer panel: tech focus on speed, data and decision-making

May 27 - (The Insurer) - Primary areas of focus for investment in technology include greater efficiencies around submission flow, speeding up responses to distribution partners, harnessing data, and aiding decision-making, according to wholesale and E&S carrier leaders.

Speaking on E&S Insurer’s “A market in uncharted territory” webinar last month, Zurich North America’s head of E&S Christopher Lewis, Axa XL’s head of wholesale solutions Tim Whisler, and Amwins CEO Scott Purviance were asked where technology is most needed in the sector.

Lewis said that in a market with retail and wholesale distribution as well as multiple carriers, a key area of focus has to be on enabling wholesalers to speedily respond to retail clients.

“So we’re investing in a variety of different technology integrations with wholesalers, so that there is much faster interconnectivity and interoperability between us and the data that gives us the decision-making capability to be fast.

“I think those things are going to be key to the success of the overall channel as we move forward,” he said.

Whisler said technology is need most to help carriers get at more submissions as business continues to surge into the wholesale channel.

“The flow of volume into the space has been staggering, and the ability to keep up with that flow, I think, is the biggest challenge facing insurance companies in our sector right now. As we continue to build out our offering in E&S, it is investment in technology to get at more submissions.

“It’s an efficiency play more than anything, to get at more business and provide a quicker response time for our wholesale partners. I'm sure AI plays a role in that … I don't know exactly what it looks like today, but I'm sure it does play a role,” he commented.

Purviance said his firm has taken the position that trying to develop an industry standard on submissions to carriers is something that’s not going to work.

“Technology is getting better and cheaper to implement, and the ability to receive a submission in any kind of format and absorb that data into your system that you've built, it's so much easier today than it was even two years ago.

“And so it's the speed of execution that everybody now has access to gather structured data from submissions … that kind of eliminates the need for any kind of massive industry standard,” he suggested.

The Amwins CEO said the broker’s focus has largely been internal when it has come to technology investments, adding capabilities to its brokers and underwriters, and making sure it has the most robust data set it can, which it captures in a single system.

This enables it to use aggregated data to build new products and programs.

“We’ve morphed into working on technology tools that not only make our brokers and underwriters better at doing their core job and bring that intellectual capital of the firm to their fingertips, but then giving some of that to our retail clients on benchmarking and using that broad set of data,” he continued.

“And then we’ve become a lot more strategic in dealing with our core carrier partners and allowing them to make sure they’re targeting the right classes of business with the right underwriters that specialise in that,” said Purviance.

AI’S HUMAN IMPACT

He added that the intermediary is also using AI, with a lot of beta testing as it experiments in different areas and begins to roll out of solutions to automate manual processes.

But he suggested that the impact on the number of people working in the sector is not likely to be major, and instead will see a shift in what employees do, and a flattening of hiring around offshore resources.

Lewis said that AI in the generic sense is being used to help bring better data insights to underwriters.

“But it’s the underwriter that has the expertise and that’s going to be making the decision. We definitely want to make sure there are humans in the loop, and we have that underwriter that has the expertise. AI tools (and) data tools really just expedite and improve the data that is getting delivered to them,” he commented.

Whisler agreed that the underwriter would need to stay in the loop and make the underwriting decision.

“I think there are a lot of attractive third-party tools out there for us to help in the underwriting process, whether it’s around wildfire scoring tools, or around crime or flood. There are a number of additional third party tools that those companies’ sole focus has been on a very small niche and to get at the specific risks associated with that.

“That’s super interesting, and can add a lot of value to the underwriting process. But it will never replace underwriting, or the underwriter. It’s giving them another piece of data to make a decision and make a decision quicker,” said the executive.