The Top 3 Ways To Optimize MGA Underwriting With A.I.
By Charles Dugas, Insurance AI Lead, Element AI —
It’s no secret that the insurance industry is facing a challenging market right now. Managing General Agents (MGAs), like brokers and carriers large and small, are looking for new and innovative ways to accelerate growth to better serve their customers and to boost revenue, however few have turned to AI for answers. Why? Could it be that many MGAs believe AI to be outside of their reach?
That’s a major mistake. AI isn’t just for large commercial carriers. In fact, many will be surprised to discover that certain AI solutions can be implemented for roughly the cost of an underwriter’s annual salary.
We developed the Element AI OS for Insurance, a platform through which AI-powered solutions are deployed to augment workflows throughout the insurance industry. In this article, we’ll explain how the Element AI OS for Insurance empowers MGAs to improve the speed and accuracy of broker submission processing, so you can get more out of your team and increase submission throughput.
We’ll focus on some key use cases where AI capabilities deployed through the EAI OS for Insurance augments the underwriting workflow. Read on for our top three ways to optimize MGA underwriting with AI.
(1.) Cut document handling and data entry workloads
The submissions process all starts with your documents. Traditionally, transferring data from printed documents, PDFs, and your digital systems into your system of records has been a necessary evil. The process is time-consuming, sometimes high-volume, often tedious, and prone to error.
With submissions coming in faster than teams can process them, MGAs are losing out on business. In fact, according to our clients, and supported by this report from McKinsey, on average, 30% of commercial submissions received are left on the table simply because they can’t be processed in time.
This is where Element AI’s Document Intelligence capability, an AI-powered document processing capability deployed through the Element AI OS for Insurance, comes in. When submission processing is powered by our technology, it takes a significant portion of the data entry workload off the shoulders of commercial underwriting professionals. Data is extracted from submissions and uploaded directly into your system of records. And it doesn’t just save time. If information is missing or incomplete, our technology will alert you, mitigating errors and preventing any problems arising from them further down the road. With underwriters now spending significantly less time performing data entry tasks, they can devote more time to more important and complexe work, like building and maintaining relationships with brokers to further drive value for your business.
(2.) Auto-decline submissions that fall outside your risk appetite
We understand a major part of the submissions process is sorting the wheat (viable submissions) from the chaff (those that don’t fit your underwriting portfolio). It’s another repetitive, manual, time-consuming task that presents underwriters with a sizeable workload. And it’s time spent that could otherwise be used more productively, focusing on underwriting and on clients that will contribute to the growth of your business.
The Element AI OS for Insurance can lighten the load by automatically declining submissions that fall outside of your risk appetite. How?. Our technology will conduct a sophisticated and timely analysis of submissions by reviewing data points which you’ve identified as critical in determining risk appetite, like business activity codes for example. Submissions that fall within your risk appetite are sent to your underwriting team for further review, while those that don’t meet the qualification criteria are automatically declined.
Once again, this helps to eliminate the submissions backlog and ensure only the right submissions end up on your underwriters’ desks, enabling them to deliver faster and more consistent service to brokers..
(3.) Prioritize the right new business opportunities
Through our work with clients, we’ve learnt just how important prioritizing the right submissions at the right time is to achieving business growth objectives.. Similarly to the use cases described above, deciding which submissions should be prioritized is time consuming. Until now underwriters have lacked state-of-the-art technology to help guide them and accelerate this process while maintaining the same level of quality..
This is another area where MGAs can optimize their underwriting workflow with AI. The Element AI OS for Insurance refines submission triaging by automating prioritization based on criteria which has historically proven to drive more revenue for your business, such as estimated closing ratio and estimated size of premium, ultimately ensuring that proprietary submissions are processed first.
This sophisticated approach to submission triaging saves your underwriting team time and ensures the submissions underwriters prioritize are more likely to align with your business objectives. These submissions will provide more revenue and have more of an impact on overall business growth – which is the ultimate result everyone’s looking for.
Ready to optimize MGA underwriting with AI?
We’ve developed a platform that’s accessible and adaptable to the needs of insurance service providers of all sizes, with ready-to-go solutions that augment workflows throughout the insurance value chain, including underwriting.
MGAs looking to grow their business and increase their submission processing capacity can’t afford to delay investing in AI technology any longer.When you start using the Element AI OS for Insurance, you’ll see just how much of an asset it can be – especially during challenging times.
Want to learn more about Element AI OS for Insurance? Let’s talk. Get in touch today.
About the Author
Charles Dugas joined Element AI in September 2017 as Director of Industry Solutions where he leads the insurance vertical, helping carriers and other insurance market participants develop and implement a strategic vision and roadmap for the rollout of AI capabilities across their organizations. Charles holds a B.Sc. in Actuarial Science, a M.Sc. in Electrical Engineering, and a Ph.D. in Machine Learning with Yoshua Bengio. He has 20 years of experience developing and implementing analytical solutions in financial services, either as an entrepreneur, a professor, or manager of large corporations’ analytical teams.
About Element AI
Element AI is a global developer of AI software that helps people work smarter. Founded in 2016 by serial entrepreneurs including JF Gagné and A.M.Turing Award recipient, Yoshua Bengio, PhD, Element AI turns cutting-edge research and industry expertise into software solutions that exponentially learn and improve. Its end-to-end offering, including advisory services, AI enablement tools and products, aims at helping large organizations operationalize AI and create real business impact. Element AI maintains a strong connection to academia through research collaborations and takes a leadership position in policy-making around the impact of technology on society.
Learn more about Element AI in the InsurTech Spotlight.
For additional information, visit www.elementai.com.
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