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March 14, 2023
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The Insurance Industry Talent and Technology Tug of War

Understaffing and unfilled positions are adding up to a big loss for commercial property and casualty (P&C) insurance providers and their underwriting teams.

By John Stammen, Convr CEO\nThe insurance industry, known as one of the oldest and most traditional industries for a younger generation of workers, is under press to perform. Following “the great resignation,” insurance companies are faced with even greater talent challenges than what they were experiencing before the COVID-19 pandemic.\nYou see, this manifested in the tug of war brewing between bosses and employees around in-office work. In a post-pandemic environment, across industries and many other industries, we continue to see workers walk away from traditional in-person jobs in hopes of securing work-from-home positions that lean toward a more flexible work environment.\nThis tug of war was underscored in findings uncovered in the Insurance Talent and Tech Trends Survey my company Convr recently commissioned. The survey screened a statistically significant sample of insurance underwriting leaders and reconfirmed that there’s a growing talent pool demanding remote work opportunities in the current insurance labor market. The survey data also strongly suggests that if insurance providers improve their technology stack, they can attract more and better talent; and those workers would have a greater ability to work successfully from home.\nThis is the undeniable future of the insurance industry’s labor market. It requires companies to increase flexibility and modernize their processes to offer an increasing number of remote and hybrid work opportunities, as the appetite for these jobs will only increase from here. Workers see remote roles as bringing a glimmer of hope to what a balanced work-life could look like; while underwriting leaders say remote positions and work opportunities are the most common request made by new underwriting hires.

Here’s what the staffing situation looks like now:

  • 64% of underwriting leaders say their team is currently understaffed
  • 63% of underwriting leaders aren’t sure they are staffed for growth
  • 56% of underwriting leaders say more than 20% of their job openings have remained unfilled for three months or longer

Considering the typical day in the life of a commercial property and casualty (P&C) underwriter, it doesn’t take much imagination to understand, with better tech solutions, how many common tasks can be better performed, if not automated entirely — satisfying employees to work at home while improving productivity.\nIndeed, 78% percent of underwriting teams say better technology, internal or outsourced, prevents employee attrition and could keep people on the job longer, with nearly 90% certain that better technology helps attract younger talent. Job satisfaction can only improve with remote work options, as some commercial P&C insurance managers and above believe that remote-only underwriting workers are less likely to quit than those in-office.\nTechnology is clearly the direction of today’s underwriting teams, and nearly 85% of leaders already expect more underwriting work to be automated. A huge driver could be that most underwriting leaders believe that manual data entry, central to the job of an underwriter, is tedious. On any given day, an underwriter typically analyzes information on insurance applications and other sources for sometimes many hours to collect the data required to determine risk exposures, appropriate premiums and amounts of coverage.\nStill, many underwriting teams have long lists of open jobs. The quantitative skills needed for underwriting are also in high demand in other industries such as tech and artificial intelligence (AI), so carriers continue to grapple with attracting and hiring a diverse core of young talent. Moreover, a younger talent pool expects a workplace with digital technology solutions and tools at their fingertips (something traditional brick-and-mortar insurers and reinsurers are not known for).\nAs it turns out, the industry is not fully addressing worker demand. Despite the numbers above, only 10% of insurance leaders say their team is attempting to attract underwriting talent by offering remote work opportunities. When insurance providers don’t meet worker expectations for jobs, they can fall further behind — turning off talent and widening the gap between qualified candidates and vacant roles.\nWorse, understaffing and unfilled positions are adding up to loss. Some 48% of underwriting leaders say understaffing is negatively affecting their expense ratio. Nearly 44% of commercial P&C executives also indicate that with some frequency, understaffing causes inaccurate information to inform their quotes. There is not much optimism surrounding hiring for underwriting teams, either, with only 39% of underwriting leaders highly confident they’ll hit their hiring quotas in 2023 – a terrifying number that will keep many up at night this year. An incentive to keep younger staff on the job — for a period, at least – is by recalibrating the dynamic of how teams work and balance remote life.\nTo do that, they must recognize that true transformation requires more than new technology. Insurers, producers and reinsurers need to begin shifting their organizational mindset and culture. This is the secret to true competitive advantage. If remote roles do not mesh with your operation, another strong option is to adopt innovative digital solutions.\nIn 2023, insurance companies should be primed to transform underwriting operations and talent management efforts if they want to remain competitive. Significantly more underwriting tasks could be automated. Remote work remains a big demand of new hires and prospective talent. Recent data underscores a critical gap exists between operational realities and the expectations of effective talent around technology and automation. As such, technology remains the key to recruitment and retention.

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Everyone knows the best models win at taming documents!\nOur Intake module ingests and enriches data from both structured and unstructured documents including PDFs, Excel and emails across commercial property and casualty (P&C) insurance asset types, including ACORDs, Inspection Forms, SOVs, Loss Runs, Schedules, and more.

Powered by Convr AI and the Risk Context Engine – a purpose-built commercial insurance ontology, knowledge graph, and semantic layer that powers a multi-line schema – transforming fragmented submissions into structured, decision-ready intelligence. By grounding every document, application and data source into a consistent schema, Convr Intake ensures contextually complete, consistent, and reliable data from the start. The result is faster processing, fewer manual touchpoints, and improved risk clarity for accelerated MGA Growth.

Through Risk 360 – a commercial insurance data lake comprised of the digital footprints of millions of businesses – Convr standardizes addresses, performs geo-coding, enriches submissions with CAT modeling codes, and adds property intelligence data such as distance to coast and other hazard indicators. The enrichment delivers a holistic decision-ready view of risk prepared for underwriting, rating, and carrier reporting.

By eliminating re-keying and reducing back-and-forth data gathering, submissions are ready to quote in less than 10 minutes! This is how our MGA customers underwrite smarter and faster to unlock substantial written-premium growth without adding to headcount.

If you’re exploring ways to scale faster with AI, better data and meaningful operational efficiency, Convr welcomes the opportunity to share how leading MGAs are using Convr today.\nJust reach out to Convr today to see how we can help!

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  • Source name
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  • State
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The new table format makes it much faster and more intuitive for users to locate the data they need. The clickable links are up-to-date avenues that serve as a streamlined source to greater information and transparency into submission data. Our customers have much to gain from this new functionality.\nTogether, these advancements within the platform's user interface mark a pivotal moment, advancing the industry toward a more intelligent and trustworthy underwriting process built on accessible, high-quality data.

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Are You Ready for an Underwriting Workbench? 4 Signs You’re Ready to Implement Now

A commercial property and casualty P&C insurance carrier’s sustainability and long-term success is best determined not only by their approach to solving today’s problems, but how poised they are for adaptation and future growth.\nUnderwriting workbenches are a powerful and effective solution to solving some of today’s top underwriting issues, but how they align to an organization’s existing processes, technologies and long-term goals will ultimately determine their success and lasting power.\nFor underwriting teams and commercial insurance organizations as a whole, there are some not-so-subtle signals that your underwriters could be ready for an underwriting workbench now and for many years into the future.\nTake a look below to see how these four signs show up across the people, processes and technology within your organization:

  1. Underwriting team members are forced to toggle between multiple systems to evaluate a single risk, losing valuable time that could be used working on other higher-value submissions
  2. Critical data is manually rekeyed or copy-pasted across tools, rather than being automatically and consistently captured, losing efficiency and productivity
  3. Documents such as PDFs, loss runs and emails, etc. are driving most underwriting decisions but are fragmented, manually processed files and hard to operationalize
  4. Quote and bind turnaround times are inconsistent or slipping, resulting in missed opportunities and losing business for your organization

\nOur team has deep insurance experience—so we get it. It’s tough to get everyone on board to implement a new tool or end-to-end solution . . . but the number of companies that have realized quick wins with Convr’s off-the-shelf, AI underwriting capabilities is remarkable—so why wouldn’t you give us a go? \n \nIf you’ve done a simple search online, you’ve likely already discovered the Convr AI Underwriting Workbench, considered our capabilities and have some understanding of how our solutions can solve some of your team’s biggest problems. Powered by a commercial P&C insurance ontology, our workbench enriches and expedites submissions decisions – reducing submission through quote times by 70%, increasing new business win rates, and quickly identifies renewal material changes. \nWith Convr you can start with the module that addresses your biggest bottleneck today, then grow into Convr's broader workbench over time. As a refresher, here are some proven off the shelf solutions you might consider: \nIntake: Our Intake engine eliminates manual submission processing by digitally ingesting, preparing and analyzing underwriting documents. For every submission that flows through your business, we extract key data points and augment the information with third-party data to broaden and deepen the risk profile. By automating and digitizing the insurance application process, underwriting teams can quote faster, with more confidence, enhanced application data and deeper insights. \nRisk 360: Commercial insurance underwriting teams can streamline research and enhance applicant data by enriching submissions with the power of AI. Risk 360 is a vast data lake comprised of the digital footprint of millions of businesses—built with an underlying knowledge graph that unleashes detailed insights from the intersection of tens of thousands of data elements. \n \nConvr AI: Deep Learning Models, Agentic and Generative AI are assistive to users generating a risk summary from submission data and helping customers perform their workflow tasks with greater ease, improving productivity. \nConvr has the skill and enthusiasm to quickly roll-out your project and implement one of these programs today. These off-the-shelf options we presented above are standard implementations that can be up and running for your operation in as few as four weeks and are a great way to advance your team’s underwriting business goals. Just ask and we’ll give you a customer reference that recently got up and running in as few as 19 days!\nTo learn more about the many modules within Convr’s AI-powered underwriting workbench contact us today at convr.com. \n

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