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Jan 25, 2023 SortSpoke

How IDP Speeds up Commercial Line Underwriting & Submission Triage

According to a 2021 underwriting survey conducted by Accenture and The Institutes, commercial lines underwriters spend 40% of their time on tasks unrelated to their core roles.


Digitization has already impacted personal lines insurance, with some carriers able to generate quotes within minutes.  

Unlike personal lines, commercial lines underwriting is still a largely manual, paper-based process due to the complexity of the risks. As submissions come in, underwriters are required to manually review and extract information from pdfs, such as:

  • Acord Forms
  • Equipment & Property Appraisals
  • Loss Runs
  • Financial Statements
  • And other types of supplemental documentation

Once underwriting has reviewed and pulled information from these documents, they can take action, such as: 

  • Decline a piece of business
  • Request additional information from brokers
  • Accept a piece of business and move it down the underwriting chain

Unfortunately, these manual processes can lead to inefficiencies throughout the underwriting cycle.  According to a recent survey, commercial lines underwriters spend 40% of their time on tasks unrelated to their core roles, such as rekeying and manual processes. 

Turning Submissions into Actionable Data

One of the benefits of SortSpoke’s Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) is that it helps underwriters automate 90% of their data extraction needs while maintaining 100% accuracy.  

SortSpoke does this through a combination of powerful machine learning + humans in the loop to pull data from all types of unstructured documents (loss runs, financial statements, etc.) and turn it into actionable data.  

A great example of this would be one of our underwriting customers who spent 6 minutes manually reviewing and extracting information from their commercial submissions.  After implementing SortSpoke, they generated a 5x productivity boost by extracting data from their submissions in 1 minute.

This time savings allowed our customers to take action much earlier in the triage process to fast-track submissions that met underwriting guidelines, quickly decline submissions that didn’t fit their risk appetite, or request additional information from brokers.

Empowering Commercial Underwriters To Do What They Do Best

Today’s commercial lines underwriters are under more pressure than ever before.  They need to review and triage submissions, respond to brokers' requests, find the time to assess and price risk, and write more business (with fewer losses).

It’s no wonder why 65% of commercial underwriters say their workload has increased or has had no change with technology investments.  

One of the main benefits our customers have seen using SortSpoke for triaging submissions is that it freed up their underwriters to focus on what they do best: assess and price risk.  

Furthermore, it also allowed underwriters to enhance their relationships with brokers by enabling them to respond to their inquiries promptly.  According to research conducted by Deep Customer Connections, 98% of independent agents agree that ease of doing business is critical in choosing which P&C carrier gets their business.  

To see for yourself how SortSpoke can accelerate your triage process, contact us to learn more about our proof-of-concept program.