Increase Commercial P&C Underwriting Capacity Using AI Technology

Approximately 65% of commercial lines underwriters say that their workload has increased or has not changed with technology investments. - Accenture 2021 Underwriting Survey

In Commercial P&C insurance, quoting and binding new business and renewals has always been a time-consuming process, especially now. 

Today’s Commercial P&C insurers are dealing with higher submission volumes, smaller underwriting teams, and heterogeneous risks where similar businesses can have vastly different risk profiles.  

For Commercial P&C underwriters to accurately assess and price these complex risks, they need to leverage data trapped in unstructured PDF documents, such as:

• Supplemental Applications
• ACORD Forms
• Appraisals 
• Financial Statements
• Loss Runs
• And more 

Typically, for underwriters to access this information, they must manually extract data from these documents, then rekey it into another system.  Over the course of a day, these manual and repetitive tasks can impact your organization via:

• Missed opportunities to quote & bind profitable submissions
• Increased risk of errors and inconsistencies
• Delayed responses to broker and policyholder underwriting inquiries

According to McKinsey & Company and Accenture studies, Commercial P&C Underwriters can spend 30% - 40% of their time on administrative tasks, such as data extraction and rekeying data.  

This is why some Commercial P&C insurers use AI to augment their underwriters to boost underwriting capacity.  For example, before engaging SortSpoke in a proof of concept, underwriters at a leading specialty insurer would spend 3 - 8 minutes manually reviewing and extracting information from financial statements to generate quotes for new business and renewals.  

After implementing SortSpoke into their underwriting workflow, they extracted the same amount of data from their financial statements (with 100% accuracy) in 45 seconds - 2 minutes.

Choosing the Right AI Solution for Your Data Extraction Needs

We understand every insurer has their own unique ways of processing new business submissions and renewals. 

Based on our experience working with 25+ insurers, if your organization processes structured documents in a handful of different formats, then an automated AI solution probably works best since the documentation is straightforward and standard. 

However, if you receive submissions in highly varied semi/unstructured formats that require 100% data accuracy and explainability, then you may want to explore solutions that combine AI + humans in the loop.

The advantage of AI + humans in the loop is that your senior underwriters train the AI on how to read and interpret complex documents.  This enables the AI to capture the institutional knowledge of your senior underwriters to ensure data is extracted in a
scalable and consistent way across your organization. 

Is Your Organization AI-Ready?

To see if your organization would benefit from augmenting your team with an AI-powered solution, we suggest downloading our self-assessment tool.  

These questions were developed by Jasper Li, CEO & Founder, SortSpoke.  Before founding SortSpoke, Jasper spent 10 years as a consultant at PwC, helping over 50 North American enterprises streamline their workflows.  

In addition to our self-assessment quiz, we’ve also published a Commercial P&C Insurers Guide to AI.  In this guide, you’ll see more real-world case studies, and you will also have access to 3 sets of self-assessment questions to see if AI can help you increase underwriting capacity, boost your quote-to-bind ratio, and improve employee retention. 

For questions and additional information, please contact us at info@sortspoke.com. 

Additional Resources

• How AI Can Solve the 3 Biggest Challenges in Commercial Underwriting
• How to Boost Your Quote to Bind Ratio with AI