The intersection between E&S underwriting and insurance technology is a topic of special interest in the industry. Insurers been adopting the newest, most cutting-edge technologies with open arms. This means great opportunity, but also means insurance companies could easily fall behind the industry standard. Jeff Boss for Forbes states that manual processes cause human error and wasted time, translating to a 20 to 30 percent revenue loss annually. For E&S underwriters, this 20 to 30 percent means much more than dollar signs, it means an increased chance for costly errors and increased expenses through additional underwriting tasks around lost history, inspections, and third-party data research.
New E&S startup ventures are disrupting the established market, creating a demand for technology that help process the complex and ever-changing nature of non-standard products. These startups are seeking to launch quickly and stay ahead of the competitive landscape despite the underwriting complexities, making the usage of real time data crucial to speed and accuracy. Both are needed to gain a competitive edge.
Underwriters, especially E&S underwriters, already handle multiple pages of data to appropriately determine eligibility, coverage limits, and premiums. Way too often, this information is still handled and calculated manually. Insurance systems often lack the capacity to produce real-time data and consolidate the gathered data to help leadership make key decisions. A product’s data set needs to easily feed an enterprise data lake, and yet this data currently cannot easily be exported. Some companies have shifted from pen and paper to Excel sheets, but Microsoft Office is certainly not robust enough to keep up with the flexibility that E&S demands. DRC’s cloud-optimized solution streamlines the process from spreadsheets to enterprise web services to generated portals and automated reporting.
E&S insurance leaders are selling complex products with complex pricing. They need an infrastructure that is just as sophisticated. The easy-to-use DRC Insurance Platform has all the features to fill in the automation and processing gaps that the E&S insurance leaders face. Pricing models are version controlled, access restricted and part of the institutional disaster recovery and backup. Excel models are converted to enterprise APIs, callable from partners, digital distribution marketplaces, and legacy systems alike. Portals for brokers and underwriting teams allow for complete risk data capture in Azure SQL for both operational and actuarial analysis.
The DRC Insurance Platform further allows E&S product owners to populate enterprise systems and tools. The star schema data warehouse makes E&S data exporting to an enterprise data lake painless. Simpler queries and simpler business reporting logic are notable advantages. The join logic of the star schema is relatively more streamlined than other join logic– where data from a transactional schema needs to be fetched. Rich user configurable dashboards and reports provide pertinent data to the necessary user communities that can also be saved and scheduled for distribution. Rich audit logging reports can track user behavior and system utilization. All of these features come together for a powerful representation of data through robust data and dynamic visuals that translate to actionable business insight.
DRC’s Rob Whitton, Vice President of Business Development, gives his insight on the unique challenges that E&S face: “E&S risks tend to have more data to review and more customized pricing models with advanced crediting and debiting. As such, E&S Product Owners historically have had less automation assistance to help process these complex risks more efficiently. DRC Insurance Platform finally empowers these E&S product teams to automate pricing rules and forms logic while storing every possible data element in an Azure SQL database for actuarial and operational review. Teams eliminate duplicate data entry, and can expose their products to a much wider audience through APIs and low-code broker portals.”
Adopting cloud-optimized solutions like the DRC Insurance Platform takes E&S product owners one step closer to comprehensive data storage, with greatly increased accuracy and improved operational efficiencies. Reduced expense ratios and better underwriting help lead to sustainable growth in a volatile market. Cleaner, more comprehensive, and timely data allows E&S underwriters to respond more quickly to their agents and focus their time on the risks that really require human review and can allow for straight through processing for certain risks. These past few years have proven that change is uncertain, risk is relentless, and E&S insurance must have the technological infrastructure to foresee the unforeseeable.
