Underwriting workstations allow insurers to circumvent manual or redundant processes and operate in a digitally enabled, collaborative environment. Workstations offer a host of process improvements. Applications can move through the underwriting process more quickly. Supporting documentation, notes, and analysis reside with the electronic file. Managers obtain insight into how long the risk assessment process takes, and gain a deep understanding of bottlenecks or opportunities to improve efficiencies. Workstations enable access to an electronic trail of underwriting process details and allow better decision making across lines of business, for strategic planning, and for regulatory compliance.

Underwriting workstations also expand and consolidate collaboration between underwriting teams and producers to quickly resolve incomplete submissions and make faster decisions about the status of applications for insurance coverage. A specialized underwriting system allows broad visibility to agents and brokers regarding the status of their submissions at all times, in turn greatly improving responsiveness and service to policyholders.

Investments in underwriting workstations allow for markedly improved risk assessment practices. System-driven, rules-based underwriting and customizable checklists ensure underwriting discipline for the entire enterprise, regardless of line of business offerings. Tailored configurability extends the accumulated knowledge of the best underwriters throughout the organization.

Today’s underwriting workstations organize diverse data sources and relational information needed to make informed risk assessment decisions in one accessible, ubiquitous system. A unified, efficient underwriting platform significantly reduces the amount of time underwriters spend gathering information. Of course, CIOs must also lead the efforts to manage all that data, isolate and supply the most valuable data, and help business users and underwriting teams disregard data that does not aid in the risk evaluation process. In effect, underwriting technology supports insurer CIOs and business users with the most agile and responsive platform to operationalize the ever-expanding sources of risk data.

Despite a host of benefits, CIOs also realize that rationalizing underwriting investment can be challenging. At any moment, insurers are likely to be investing in a series of technology upgrades and new projects including, complicated policy administration systems and other improvements to legacy enterprise architecture. Additionally, some insurers perceive that underwriting workstations are redundant because policy systems can contain a limited set of underwriting capabilities. Some CIOs would thus be hard pressed to support underwriting technology enhancements as a top priority.

Significant for the CIO’s mandate to accelerate positive transformation and innovation is the fact that underwriting systems bring a level of efficiency, scale, and precision to the strategic underwriting process not available in policy systems. Those CIOs who have already led their companies to invest in dedicated underwriting software continue to achieve better and faster risk decisions by underwriters— compared to when they relied on the limited underwriting capabilities of policy systems. Moreover, underwriting workstations are specifically designed to integrate easily with legacy or modern policy and other systems. SMA research notably reveals that underwriting workstations can have the highest value when integrated with modern policy systems.

The scalability, collaboration, and risk assessment capabilities of underwriting systems are making underwriting technology investments a necessity. Led by innovative CIOs and their business cohorts, insurers who have made the investment are seeing a range of efficiencies, distinct competitive advantages, and improved top line growth. Among the enterprise benefits are faster, more accurate, and data-driven risk decision making, responsiveness to producers, dramatic increases in submission intake and quality without adding underwriting staff, and lower loss ratios.