Throughout our many years delivering underwriting technology solutions to the insurance market, we’ve noticed a clear pattern emerging. When we speak to potential customers about what they want their technology to do for them, most will give valid but vague responses, such as: “We need to improve broker response time”, or “We need to improve our submission-to-quote ratio”.
These are sensible answers; in the current market, everyone wants to work faster, more efficiently and ultimately, more profitably. However, when we drill down into these business objectives, we find that many insurers are unable to fully identify their current performance metrics, thereby making it impossible to accurately measure improvement.
This creates a fundamental problem: if you can’t clearly define what you value from your technology investments, how do you measure whether they’re delivering?
More importantly, how do you ensure your business objectives and technology capabilities are actually aligned?
Understanding the value gap
Some of the top underwriting challenges we are asked to solve include:
- “We want faster quote turnaround”
- “How can we grow quicker?”
- “We need faster broker response times”
- “Better risk selection”
- “How can we do more without adding headcount?”
There’s no doubt that these contribute to the insurers’ performance, but without being able to measure your starting point, how can you track progress? Without a clear understanding of your current state-of-play and an awareness of the individual value drivers that inform each of these objectives, insurers risk investing in technology solutions that will ultimately prove costly.
But why does this value gap exist?
We can’t really blame insurers for struggling to articulate value in relation to their underwriting technology solutions. After all, the market and available technology have changed significantly over time.
First, when we look at the London market in particular, historically comfortable margins have created an environment where process efficiency wasn’t the imperative as it is today, an element of complacency has crept in, and the old adage “we’ve always done it that way” still prevails in many areas.
Second, the rapid advancement of technology. Technology solutions have evolved in silos. Insurers have typically adopted point solutions as they’ve become available, but without the underlying spine that connects these fragmented solutions. Without this end-to-end visibility, meaningful measurement can become complicated.
The sheer variety and diversity of business lines, models and risks also complicate matters; what constitutes “good” for one company, or even business area, may differ dramatically from another.
Joining the dots
As well as defining clear benchmarks, we believe that it’s vital to map insurers’ biggest value drivers to the specific activities that sit behind them. That way, insurers can focus on the individual levers that will contribute to the achievement of their goals and have the ability to measure them.
Send is committed to guiding insurers through this deeper level of strategic thinking and helping them better understand how the technology they chose can contribute to their overarching objectives.
We’ve developed the Underwriting Benefits Map, a practical table that lists the four biggest value drivers insurers are chasing: Growth, Improving COR, Managing Risk, and Talent, and a breakdown of the benefits, benefit levers and key measurements.
This gives insurers a simple way to identify the values that matter most, but more importantly, gives them a clear framework to help them understand and articulate how technology can help them to realise these values.
As technology underpinning the insurance cycle continues to develop, and we see more offerings hit the market, we want to help insurers make the right decisions for their business by asking the right questions.
Our Underwriting Benefits Map gives you a clear framework to define what you value, measure what matters, and choose technology that delivers real results. Because in today’s market, “harder, better, faster and stronger” isn’t a strategy, it’s wishful thinking without the metrics to back it up.
Learn more about our Underwriting Benefits Map here: Underwriting Platform Value Drivers