Specialty insurer Markel and insurtech Cytora have revealed an increase of 113% in productivity (GWP per FTE) for Markel’s underwriting team as a result of their partnership.
Cytora and Markel announced their partnership back in 2021 with the aim of transforming the latter’s underwriting process into digital workflows by leveraging AI to automate pre-underwriting activities, perform upfront evaluations of risks, and eliminate the rekeying of data. With this in place, the theory was that Markel’s underwriters would be able to focus on decision-ready risks with a high propensity to quote and bind.
As a result of the partnership, the average quote turnaround time for Markel’s strategic partners has been reduced from one day to just two hours.
Prior to working with Cytora, Markel estimated that its underwriters would spend 30% of their time on low skill and low value tasks. Senior underwriters had to assess every incoming submission and route them to the appropriate underwriter. This impeded the time spent on high value tasks, such as managing broker relationships and handling complex risks.
With the new technology in place, risks are digitised upfront and augmented with additional data sources. Data is brought together for evaluation, which will be triaged and routed to the right specialist underwriter. Underwriters receive decision-ready risks within minutes.
“We are committed to giving brokers and clients enhanced service levels and Cytora has been a foundational partner helping us to effectively grow our scale and enable our underwriters to provide enhanced service to customers and brokers,” said Neil Galjaard, managing director at Markel. “We are now deepening our partnership with Cytora to build on the success we have achieved to date and are excited about creating further value for our brokers and clients in this next phase.”
“Markel is a leading example of an insurer embracing the latest technology to revolutionise its business,” said Richard Hartley, CEO and co-founder of Cytora. “We know that AI-driven digital risk processing has the capacity to transform organisations by vastly improving efficiency and freeing employees up to do much higher value work. Our partnership with Markel is a clear example of this in action - the productivity increases are significant. It underscores what can be achieved when insurers invest in digitising their underwriting workflows.”
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