While the market has been talking about digital placement for many years, the Quote stage remains largely unchanged – still dominated by emails and documents. It’s clear from my discussions with carriers over the last few months that enabling digital quoting is fast becoming a pressing matter rather than a future strategic vision. Why is that, and what does this mean for carriers and their underwriting technology?
Nothing new – but picking up pace
This change of pace is driven, as ever, by the Brokers; their investments in Digital over the last 5 years are finally starting to come to fruition through the likes of WTW’s Neuron, McGill’s Underscore, Aon’s Co-pilot etc. Marsh’s recent digital launch event with MAC heightened the sense of urgency still further. Structured data is increasingly available up front, and they’re leveraging portals and API channels to bolster their control over placement and drive efficiencies.
Some CUO’s have remained cautious about underwriting technology – after all, profits have been strong and they’ve been bitten (several times) before. Even the most the most traditional however are now pushing their leadership for a clear digitisation strategy. Changing market conditions and concrete plans for digital quote / bind picking up pace in business they’ve written for many years present serious threats (and opportunities). Premium that was previously ‘safe’ will now only be available to carriers with the right technology capabilities. If you can’t confirm appetite electronically and instantly that business will no longer be available to you. Speed, connectivity and accuracy matter now more than ever, as the pressure is on to make better risk selections faster.
To temper the acceleration of this hype train – the market’s not going to flip suddenly to fully digital, far from it. Traditional submission channels and ‘human-led – tech-augmented’ underwriting will remain the lion’s share for years to come. However, I do believe that 2026 is the year that the inevitable transition will begin in earnest, a small but still significant minority. From there, we will see a steady increase every year in the % of GWP that is solely available through digital placement – I’m not going to speculate on the pace of that growth.
The complexity of managing this is increased by the fact that it’s happening in all placement types – open market (lower-value business and follow), broker facilities and binders. It’s also happening at different paces for different brokers, markets and lines of business.
So how can carriers protect their books and seize the competitive advantage from competitors as these changes pick up pace?
The solution
Underwriting leaders have long recognised the best solution is to have a unified underwriting platform that orchestrates the heart of the underwriting journey; what’s become known as the ‘Workbench’. For this to work effectively, this platform needs to cater for the complexities of all your business variations, types and channels but on a consistent, data-rich foundation. It also now needs to be able to leverage AI in a relevant, secure, consistent and auditable way
So far, nothing ground-breaking – I wrote about the benefits of this recently in ‘The Crowded Underwriting Workbench Landscape.’
The trap for carriers
This new sense of urgency for automated underwriting presents a potential trap for carriers in 2026. Those who remain without a unified digital foundation in place across their business may fall into the trap of trying to approach things tactically to move at pace.
Let’s say you approach it on a case-by-case basis as they crop up:
- Broker X announces a follow facility will be ‘digital only’ from next year – Build for that
- Your Marine team packages up a low-value cargo product for digital quote & bind – Build for that
- Your FI team want more data from email submissions – Buy an IDP (intelligent document processing) solution
- FI team realise they get no value from data on their own and need somewhere to use it – Build direct integration to the FI rating model
- Realise the rating tool is too limited to manage operational requirements – Build a custom interface, workflow and integrations
- Specie team want the same as FI – Build it custom again as the FI work isn’t re-usable
- Etc.
At first, this will seem like a cheaper, more nimble approach. No single solution requires eye-watering investment or reputational risk, and technology teams like the fact that they can more directly own and control the process. Ultimately, however, approaching it like this will result in a landscape that is:
- Fragmented across your portfolio
- Expensive to build
- Expensive to maintain
- Disconnected between traditional, digital and delegated business
- Hard to scale
- Slow to change
- Inconsistent
Sound familiar? That’s exactly the landscape that carriers have been working hard to move away from; they’ve seen how it impacts their business’s ability to maintain return on equity in a dynamic market.
So who is at risk of falling into this trap? I can see it happening to a Carriers for a few reasons:
- They’ve tried and failed/struggled to build their own ‘workbench’ and have arrived at the incorrect conclusion for why: that the target state vision was unachievable rather than the choice of approach and technology was flawed. The level of lost time, huge sunk costs and risk to personal reputations may cloud judgements.
- They haven’t yet invested significantly in underwriting technology and have managed until now with a proactive IT team that may be apprehensive about committing to a larger change journey and investment, particularly as they prepare for lower profits in 2026.
- They’ve think they no longer have time to put in place a strategic foundation following tales of multi-year self-build workbench journeys.
- They’ve got working solutions in place for particular areas of the value chain that they don’t want to replace.
All understandable reasons, and I appreciate how significant these decisions can be for the leaders tasked with making them. Even if your company finds itself in the scenarios above, with the right approach they don’t need to be a barrier to delivering both timely and strategic results.
With the right partner you can still make automated underwriting a reality in 2026 whilst laying the foundations for the years to come.
How can Send help?
This is where Send comes in and stands out from all other vendors in the underwriting ‘workbench’ space. We’re not just: a basic workbench, an IDP vendor, a submission triage tool, a pricing platform, tailored for simple mid-market risks, focused on open market, an algo-follow solution or a BDX mapping engine.
Send provides all of those capabilities and more in a single place – a holistic platform for complex underwriting. Across all placement channels and lines and (to pull it back to the main theme) across both automated and traditional underwriting methods.
That doesn’t mean our platform is a ‘take what you are given’, rigid off-the-shelf solution – that doesn’t work in this market. Send is highly configurable to whatever process and data nuances you need and the legacy estate you have. So you don’t have to replace everything you’ve got – if something’s working well, it can be seamlessly integrated as part of the solution. It also doesn’t mean that it’s perfect, there is no perfect solution – just a best one!
What it does mean, however is our implementations are quicker, cheaper and have higher success rate than any other enterprise underwriting solution. Our customers (15 in London and growing) typically deliver a proven end-to-end solution within 6 months – saving £5m+ on development costs.
So, if you are considering your company’s strategy approach to auto / algo underwriting alongside ensuring the competitiveness and profitability of your ‘traditional’ underwriting channels, please reach out. We’d love to walk through how Send can work as your underwriting partner.
By Lloyd Peters, Head of Revenue (UK & EMEA) at Send.
Connect with Lloyd on LinkedIn.