Digital Underwriting is raising the bar

Customers’ expectations have shifted, framed by their retail experiences on the likes of Amazon and Netflix raising the bar on what they mean by world class service.  In insurance, players like Bought by Many and Simply Business have successfully digitized their workflows and the impact has been clear.  Others are following suit across both Commercial and Personal Lines, including established brands like Romero’s and CETA, or emerging brands like Lucida, AllClear and Carrot. Whether a retail or wholesale delegated schemes broker or MGA, an insurer providing capacity to MGAs and Schemes, or an insurer providing niche products direct to the consumer, the industry is recognising this truth and is rallying to embrace the future. 

Underwriting is one area that has so far fallen short.  Underwriters typically spend a small fraction of their time actually assessing risk. Manual tasks leave underwriters little or no time to think strategically.  The market seems content to, or trapped, to persist with outdated technologies which prevent them from delivering the sort of customer journey and experience they aspire to and that customers expect across all lines of business, and which inhibit underwriters from focusing on the areas where they can add most value to the business and its customers.

Digital underwriting automates and strips out the manual processes that get in the way of delivering an exceptional retail and wholesale customer experience.  The concept of Digital underwriting that can work across multiple lines has been a panacea of the industry for many years now – illusive, undeveloped and inaccessible for most brokers and MGAs, particularly for non-standard policies that need a high degree of flexibility…. until now. 

Unhindered by legacy technology, and importantly legacy thinking, the team at Aventus has assembled a technology ecosystem for insurers, brokers and MGAs which:

• Makes digital underwriting a reality for both open market and niche schemes products and services across both Commercial and Personal Lines of business on the same system
• Provides a true holistic single view of customers
• Gives them control of the customers’ journey and experience
• Puts the business staff in control of underwriting rules, pricing and rating.
• Changes the rules of the game in terms of product build and deployment: fast, secure, simple
• Enables them to easily assemble a world class digital ecosystem with the added flexibility to integrate their other preferred technologies or recommended other digital components
• Helps them to move beyond data reporting and visualisation, to intelligent cross and up-sales and predictive analytics.

Flexibility of the platform means it can offer a combination of automated and manual underwriting and referral workflows and the system aims to guide, not restrict.  Brokers and MGAs of any shape and size can automate some or all of the underwriting process and at the same time offer the personalised approach to underwriting that customers now expect. 

Underwriters can ‘define’ their products by outlining key elements of cover including exclusions.  In line with underwriting rules, this template can then be flexed in real time to quote and bind policies using automated ratings, and update and manipulate pricing and wordings with precision, in response to changing market and business needs.

Effective Digital Underwriting tools also need dynamic automated bordereaux reporting and performance analytics, giving all users complete, real-time oversight and transparency.  The Aventus platform provides this, with valuable, actionable MI, that gives underwriters and importantly their carriers the assurance that underwriting is being delivered to the standards they expect and more.  

Digital Underwriting is one of the four central pillars of The Aventus Platform which now offers its clients full end to end capability including: Distribution, Accounting, CRM and now Digital Underwriting with data and data enrichment at the heart of the process.

For more information contact@aventusplatform.com