Schmelkin: AI insurtech Sixfold’s ‘holy grail’ is boosting premium-to-underwriter metric

By James Thaler

June 20 - (The Insurer) - Sixfold can boost gross written premium per underwriter by 30% to 40%, its founder Alex Schmelkin said, calling the metric the company's “holy grail”.

AI underwriting automation platform Sixfold can train models on carriers’ appetites, Schmelkin told The Insurer TV at this month’s Insurtech Insights USA conference in New York City, a development he described as a “breakthrough”.

“Our customers today use us at the very point of when a risk comes in their front door to triage it, analyse it, help them with decisions and say, is this a good risk, is this a bad risk, and why?” he said. “The way that's evolved to is it got us to the point that now our customers started saying, ‘Okay, you've gotten really good at transactional underwriting.'

“(They are saying:) ‘I'm saving time. I'm highly accurate. How can I figure out when a new risk comes in, how is that affecting my portfolio? How can I maybe be more expansive in my guidelines for this risk or that risk, and really view it as an overall risk mix capability?’

“Getting into the next frontier is helping people to think about the entire mix in their portfolio,” he added.

'HOLY GRAIL'

Sixfold primarily focuses on enhancing the amount of gross written premium underwritten by any one underwriter, Schmelkin said. “It's kind of our holy grail. In most big commercial shops today, their senior underwriters are writing about $5 million to $7 million of premium a year, and when they use a tool like ours, they're writing between $7 million and $9 million.

“We're seeing 30% to 40% growth in the amount of premium that the underwriter is able to write,” he said.

“So, at the end of the day, if we're bringing more effectiveness and bringing more efficiency to that team, we're winning – but something has to come first, and the very first thing that they focus on is accuracy,” he explained.

Schmelkin said Sixfold’s tech is able to seamlessly replicate how an insurer’s underwriter would score a risk on their own.

“And so, those two things combined are really what drive the expansion and what drive our adoption and our customer,” he said, adding that Sixfold’s roster of clients is made up of large carriers, reinsurers and MGAs looking for efficiency and accuracy gains.

“When we start a new engagement, we bring in the guidelines, and then we marry it to the last six months or so of underwriting decisions. What emerges is this underwriting brain that really is approximately like a senior underwriter being able to intake a risk and evaluate it, find the good things, find the bad things,” he said.