It’s no secret that the insurance industry has always operated on narrow margins. Now, in the midst of a disruptive marketplace, it’s more important than ever that insurers put all the tools at their disposal to work to hone their competitive edge. One tool that insurance companies are looking to is intelligent underwriting.
According to Mike Hofert, Managing Director of Insurance Solutions at Pitney Bowes, intelligent underwriting tools have enabled insurance companies to combine high-quality data, analytics, intelligence, and insight into a unified dashboard that can provide a snapshot of risk exposure.
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“By putting data to work an insurer can improve the overall quality of their underwriting efforts by identifying key exposures that might otherwise have gone unnoticed but that need to be addressed and factored into pricing,” said Hofert. “Underwriters have traditionally spent a lot of time gathering data about environmental hazards in addition to information about a property’s value, structure, and issues to do with proximity to other neighborhood features or hazards,” he continued.
However, as climate change alters the patterns and intensity of wildfires, floods, wind events, to name just a few hazards, and as neighborhoods change rapidly with growing social mobility, it’s difficult for underwriters to keep pace. But by using cloud-based data-powered tools underwriters stand a fighting chance to keep abreast of these changes and bring a new level of rigor and efficiency to the underwriting process.
“To be able to enter an address into a search box and combine it with map data that’s augmented with rules-based alerts, in a single view, underwriters can cut the time they spend in evaluating a property in half, while increasing the accuracy and quality of their work,” shared Hofert. “Not only does this result in better policies for the customer but helps improve the bottom line of the carrier.”
Learn more about intelligent underwriting from Accenture and Pitney Bowes here.
