While many insurance professionals are aware of the business opportunities inherent in technology, one industry leader points to another benefit of innovation: increased job satisfaction.
This may be particularly felt within the underwriting community, says Guidewire’s VP of strategy, Neil Betteridge. The field is rapidly evolving, most notably with
Swiss Re’s deployment of IBM Watson in its Life & Health Reinsurance business unit.
While it’s too soon to speculate on what that’ll mean for the profession decades down the line, Betteridge feels that analytics and intelligence computing will be immensely beneficial to underwriters well into the foreseeable future.
“So far, we’re observing two paths,” he said. “One is that more simple accounts are seeing business handled in a system that applies underwriting rules until something is out-of-bounds, at which point is referred to human underwriting to apply a more nuanced judgment.”
The other, he says, is commercial lines are using technology to “improve the capabilities of the underwriter,” allowing for a more synthesized way of focusing on relevant material. Underwriting visualization analysis offered by Guidewire, for example, allows commercial groups to quickly see how close a property is to common perils based on “red, yellow and green” indicators on a digital map.
As this technology becomes more sophisticated, underwriters are embracing the new solutions that now spare them from routine and monotonous tasks.
“There’s definitely a change management dimension involved, but I was at an Underwriting Executive Council last week, and they’re very excited about the possibilities of it,” Betteridge said.
In fact, he believes that underwriters’ jobs will be significantly enhanced with the evolution of analytics and cognitive computing.
“There’s certainly an aspect of their work that isn’t always engaging, such as having to leaf through a 20-page report to analyze the underwriting suitability of a building and going page by page to manually search for issues,” he said. “This, however, allows them to move upstream to more complex cases of business, which is certainly something they can appreciate.”
