Augmenting Underwriting Teams' Competitiveness with Insurance Document AI

In the past half century, insurance underwriting has become more complex, more demanding and more fiercely competitive.  

Underwriters have impossible amounts of information to process, and more demanding internal and external stakeholders to please. Together, these pressures create challenges largely falling into three key areas:  

1. Processing data faster and more accurately – as is often heard in commercial insurance, “the first quote is the best quote.” Underwriters understand risk. The challenge is enabling them to apply their knowledge and expertise reliably and at speed. ‍
2. Building organizational strength to do more. Expanded capacity drives growth. The key to boosting productivity and capacity is offloading non-core work being performed by underwriters. ‍
3. Taking broker relationships to a higher level. A recent Capgemini study revealed 70% of insurance executives view underwriters as potential broker/agent relationship and product development specialists. Again, creating bandwidth for underwriters is essential to realizing this potential.

Digital augmentation for data problems

These three issues are grounded in a single problem: underwriting teams cannot devote enough of their valuable time to underwriting.  

An Accenture/The Institutes survey revealed underwriters today spend up to 40% of their effort on non-core underwriting activities. These “inefficient systems, redundant inputs and manual processes” (per the survey’s respondents) largely stem from insurance’s greatest business challenge: unlocking vital information trapped inside unstructured data.  

Increased pressure to crunch data faster forces underwriters to shift their focus to tasks, like searching documents in multiple formats for relevant information they can apply to judgments.

Much of the conventional technology implemented by insurers to contend with unstructured data has come in the form of complex add-ons (e.g., IDP tools), rather than vertically integrated systems. One result of this is 64% of underwriters expressed that IT has actually increased their workload or made no difference.  

This is what artificial intelligence (AI) for underwriting is built for. A thoughtfully designed Insurance Document AI solution helps people do their best work.  

And that’s where Roots Automation Digital Coworkers enter the picture.

With Digital Coworkers, underwriting teams can:  

• Reduce time needed to validate brokers and submissions, by executing straight-through processing of documents containing unstructured data.
• Triage new business, allowing underwriters to prioritize work that creates value.
• Collect data from multiple sources for more objective pricing to help retain more business with simplified renewals.

How does this stack up in action? Let’s look at the results. One multinational carrier using Digital Coworkers experienced 99.5% accuracy extracting policy level data from submissions – massively reducing underwriter reviews.  

Another insurer partnering with Roots saw their ACORD form processing time drop from between 10 and 15 minutes to less than two minutes per document – hugely improving potential underwriting capacity.

Remove barriers; unlock potential

So, what do the Olympic and Paralympic Games have to do with all this?  

This Summer, the Games are in Paris, where competitors will live by the ideals expressed in the Olympic motto, “Citius, Altius, Fortius” (Faster, Higher, Stronger”).  

We find our inspiration in Paralympic athletes’ use of technology. Compare wheelchairs in this year’s Paralympic Games with those used at the 1960 inaugural event; or the advanced composite construction “blades” used by today’s amputee runners. These technologies have evolved in ways that empower competitors to show only their true abilities; not just how they overcome challenges.

Roots Automation Digital Coworkers can similarly augment underwriting talent in insurance by playing to underwriters’ innate strengths to deliver peak performance.

Technology works best when it empowers people.  

The goal of Insurance Document AI is to augment human ingenuity and skill, not replace it. Over the next decade, the most successful insurers will be ones that free their people to pursue growth. These businesses will be magnets for the innovative underwriting, who go to work to create value, rather than manage processes.  

To build a high-performance underwriting operation like this requires commitment… and the right tools. To learn how you can bring this power to your organization, download our latest whitepaper, "Transforming Commercial Underwriting with Digital Coworkers.” In this publication, you’ll find use cases, case stories, insights and other resources to help your underwriting team create gold medal results.