Quality Data Streamlines Insurer’s Decision-making, Improves Competitiveness

A large insurer offers a broad range of property/casualty products across most U.S. states and the District of Columbia. The company works through independent insurance agents, who live in the communities they serve and build relationships to support satisfied, loyal policyholders. To streamline and improve underwriting and pricing decisions, the insurer’s personal-lines group rolled out an array of Precisely Spectrum solutions and datasets. The result is a straight-through process that, in many cases, enables policies to be written without input from a human underwriter. For policies that require human intervention, Spectrum Spatial streamlines quality data and decision-making. Both approaches save time for agents and for the insurer’s internal staff. They also lead to better underwriting and pricing decisions.

For a property/casualty insurer, having high-quality information about each insured property is key to effectively managing risks. “Every insurer uses rating segmentation,” explains the company’s vice president of operations, personal lines department. “Underwriting decisions are based on external data, loss experience, and capacity in each geography.” Two decades ago, the company’s personal lines transitioned from rudimentary rating software to a modern, web-based solution. The VP and his colleagues focused on supporting underwriting, rating, and compliance with comprehensive, high quality data on every property. “If actuaries are basing rates on inaccurate data, there are going to be errors in the rates,” he says. “We wanted to implement a system and datasets that would provide solid and accurate information. Improving our property-related datasets supported better decision-making, and it helps ensure regulatory and tax compliance.”

Today, an agent working with a prospective property/casualty customer answers a series of questions in the insurer’s policy administration system. Then, that web-based system accesses the Spectrum platform, which draws data from other Precisely solutions and datasets to support straight-through underwriting and pricing processes for many policies.

Read more about this insurer and how quality data has saved agents time.