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Following what is known as “the great resignation,” insurance companies are faced with even greater talent challenges than what they were experiencing before the COVID-19 pandemic. The insurance industry—known for being one of the oldest and least appealing industries for a younger generation of workers is getting pressure to transform. The hush-hush belief that “no one wants to work in the insurance industry,” is one that especially carries over to this younger crowd and can no longer be silenced.The war for talent was underscored in findings uncovered in the 2022 Insurance Talent and Tech Trends Survey commissioned by Convr. The study, conducted by an independent firm, sampled a statistically significant sample of insurance underwriting leaders and reconfirmed that younger talent—those between the ages of 21 and 40 remain the hardest to recruit and retain.\nBut there could be an incentive to keep these younger staff on the job—for a period, at least, by recalibrating the dynamic of how teams work and balance remote life. More than 80% of respondents said remote work is a “must have” for new recruits. And following the pandemic there is a universal belief that work life balance with flexibility, an emphasis on putting family first and providing remote and hybrid opportunities is essential to peace of mind. Still, merely 25% of underwriting leaders say their company is offering positions with a remote option. Knowing that offering more remote roles could be the cure to securing young talent, you would think more companies would be jumping on that bandwagon.\nCompounding this situation is that 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 P&C executives also indicate that with some frequency, understaffing causes inaccurate information to inform their quotes. Net-net, not much optimism surrounds hiring for underwriting teams. Only 39% of underwriting leaders are highly confident they’ll hit their hiring quotas in 2023!\nIf remote roles don’t mesh with your operation, another strong option is to adopt innovative digital solutions. Make no mistake, this younger talent pool demands and expects a workplace with digital technology solutions and tools at their fingertips. Something traditional brick and mortar insurers and reinsurers are not known for.\nOur survey results support that notion, as 78% percent of underwriting teams say better tech prevents employee attrition and nearly 90% are certain that better technology helps attract younger talent. Plus, tech seems to be the direction underwriting teams are already heading as nearly 85% of leaders expect more and more underwriting work to be automated. One of the main reasons could be that most underwriting leaders believe that manual data entry, central to the job of an underwriter—is tedious.\nRecognize also that true insurtech adoption and 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.\nAs technology continues to transform the insurance industry, you can lead the revolution in your organization by reaching out to Convr. Convr’s AI-infused commercial underwriting platform turbo-charges underwriting with more accurate and efficient decision-making and a greatly improved user experience.\nAt Convr, we’re your partners in defining a new and better vision for commercial P&C underwriting.

Data is an essential component of our products at Convr. This article describes the structure and method by which we deliver data to the Convr platform and applications.\nThe following diagram depicts how large volumes of data are ingested, processed, transformed, stored, and made accessible to users.

Components of Convr’s data architecture:

Ingest

Convr’s data pipelines ingest data from private, public, and social media sites. A few examples of data that is ingested:

• Firmographic, property, and geolocation data,
• Business inspection, violation, permit, and license data
• Business reviews from social media sites such as Yelp, Google

Retrieving data is time consuming and expensive. Our data pipelines automate the process of retrieving data from hundreds of different sources.

Standardize

Since data sources collect information for different purposes, similar data is very often stored within different data models and on different database systems. Hence, the same information may be represented in a variety of ways and in different formats.\nData standardization converts information into a common format and common terminology. This delivers the ability to build reports and applications without having to create multiple mappings of the same data. For example, phone numbers are converted into one format:\n

Combine/Enrich

The data pipelines pull together the information for each company from all data sources. In addition, the data is enhanced with statistical risk scoring generated by data science models.

Integrate

In addition to ingesting data from various sources, the Convr application performs real-time integration of data from data analytics companies (such as Verisk, Core Logic, etc.) and social media sites (such as Google places, Yelp, and Bing)

Deliver

Data is delivered to our customers via Convr application UI (User Interface) and via data API’s.

Convr Data Infrastructure

Convr data pipelines run on AWS cloud resources. Data pipelines use S3 (Simple Storage Service) for storage and EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) nodes for processing.

Convr applications and data pipelines are implemented using open-source software:

• Python programming language
• ElasticSearch for our data lake
• Apache Spark™, Apache Kafka™ for data transformation
• Flask framework for web services and data API’s
• mySQL, Maria for our application databases

Our data stack philosophy:

• Look to mature open-source software with large community adoption and support rather than re-inventing the wheel
• Ensure the software scales easily as data is constantly increasing and new products are being added as the business grows
• Automate processes as much as possible by using CI/CD (Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment) and other orchestration tools

Given the critical importance of data to our business and the business of our customers, Convr is committed to ensuring the standards and security of our data platform. We are also committed to the education of our customers and the transparency of our operations. Please look forward to other articles describing our infrastructure and capabilities.

Commercial P&C insurance quoting is getting easier for underwriters who utilize the Convr Command Center. Now, as submissions are received, the Convr platform automatically labels and routes them into separate work queues based on configurable business rules—a process known as auto-labeling.\nConvr’s Auto-labeling applies artificial intelligence (AI) to enrich, annotate and label items, allowing users to manually assign user-defined tags to submissions, similar to the user experience of tagging emails in an inbox.\nClassifying, sorting, and routing inbound submissions are essential precursors to the underwriting process. Defying the time consuming and labor-intensive tasks underwriting teams often face, Convr’s auto-labeling functionality supports seamless end-to-end workflows, from submission clearance to routing as well as the implementation of business rules specific to a product or team. By leveraging AI, Convr reduces the amount of manual effort required to categorize risks and streamlines the entire underwriting workflow.

How it Works

Auto-labeling extends the Convr embedded AI engine to systematically add tags based on specific submission characteristics. The labels reduce manual effort by eliminating the need for an individual to inspect each submission and route it to the appropriate downstream process. Through our unique auto-labeling system, we’re eliminating unnecessary manual steps for the underwriter, which improves their ability to work smarter and faster as they progress through the underwriting process.\nFor example — Convr automatically identifies “Rush,” submissions, i.e. submissions that needed a quick turnaround. Convr’s combination of embedded AI, natural language processing (NLP) analyzes the submissions to mark submissions as “Rush” and with the power of auto-labelling, all “Rush” submissions are then automatically prioritized at the top of the queue for underwriting review—expediting the submission.

Hearing Our Customers

Our customers talk about underwriting pain points and we listen. With new algorithms and design, our platform is bettering the way commercial insurance organizations operate and do business. We’re upping the game in insurance by significantly improving efficiency, workflow and automation, and our product keeps getting better.\nEven greater functionality is in the works—soon Convr will make these auto-labels individually configurable by end users. Another sign that we’re building the Convr Command Center to be future-proof—built in a way that’s configurable and adaptable to using new technology—adjusting to workflows, configurations and use cases.

Questions?

To learn more about our product development, reach out to Suzanne Vranicar, Business Development Representative at suzanne.vranicar@convr.com

Capturing data is one thing but using data to figure out and solve problems is a whole other ballgame. That’s what Convr’s usage of the Snowflake Cloud Data Platform brings to the table. Snowflake is a flexible cloud-based warehouse that’s scalable and adaptable and Convr is using the capability to better serve customers by capturing insights that can inform future commercial underwriting. The data warehouse facilitates Convr’s data access and the ease with which we can use it to develop deep insights. For most of the actions taken by underwriters in the Convr Command Center data can be reused for deeper analysis in the future. We enable that capability with Snowflake, which automatically handles all indexing and partitioning, saving time and effort for engineers, data scientists or whoever is interpreting the data. Their auto organizing allows the user to better leverage Snowflake’s structured and semi-structured data to drive meaningful insights.

Sparking a Connection

Through the Snowflake capability, Convr customers can now easily revisit old submission information – to better recall and reflect on the decisions leading up to their underwriters’ risk selections. For example, one way Convr customers are benefiting from Snowflake is through the ease at which mounds of data can be recalled. Snowflake enables a log of all activity and time spent on tasks. So, when an underwriter performs commercial property and casualty searches such as business names – that information can be recalled later and reflected on. The same is true for search results. You can review cards and determine how long an underwriter spent reflecting on that particular topic.

Getting Granular

And you can get very granular views on underwriting activity and what the nature of the businesses are that your underwriters are looking up. You can also look at the business profile and determine from there – that it falls into a certain category of risk similar to that of other businesses within the same industry. Further, you can determine that your team has been looking at several businesses in the same field and find commonalities to help your organization make better selections within that type of risk category. And Convr’s use of Snowflake brings peace of mind with a cloud database that pulls all the information in and stores it long-term, so you don’t have to worry about losing it or not having something that you may want to go back and reflect on in the future. For questions about our use of Snowflake Cloud Data Platform, email Harish Neelamana, Convr Co-founder and President at harish.neelamana@convr.com

The intersection of insights and innovation . . . collaboration and challenge – that’s what Convr heard this year at InsureTech Connect (ITC) 2022 in Las Vegas, NV. It was busy . . . busy . . . and with so many comings and goings – demos and conversations, it was easy for attendees to get caught up in the mix of all the other vendors and happenings . . . but with Convr, this year’s event sponsorship further confirmed our purpose and value.\nOver the course of two days at ITC, September 21 and 22, Convr team members were able to talk with hundreds of conference goers about the efficiencies and advancements our platform can bring to Commercial P&C insurers, reinsurers, MGA’s, MGU’s, brokers and more through the power of artificial intelligence (AI).

What we do

Convr is an AI-based underwriting platform that digitizes and fuses submissions with best sources of data to surface underwriting insights, business classification and risk scores. At ITC, we met with some of the most tech-centric folks in the business – devoted to bettering the lives of insureds.\nAnd Convr’s platform can do just that, every day our software platform speeds submission to quote by simplifying and expediting the insurance underwriting process – improving the experience for customers and insurance underwriters along the way. With the quick return on investment our tool brings, ITC was the perfect space for #teamconvr to share what we bring to the table.

Here are some of our team’s greatest takeaways . . .

It’s clear that IT organizations across all categories of P&C commercial insurance are driving towards digitizing and modernizing their underwriting process. Organizations appreciate the flexibility that a solution, such as Convr can provide when integrating with their existing systems and accelerating their ability to modernize with little to no disruption. Modernizing, a Commercial carrier's underwriting process is no longer an after-thought, rather a key initiative heading into 2023 thanks in large part to the advances in AI and ML. Convr is best positioned to meet these requirements.\n– Greg Kranz, Chief Business Development Officer, Convr\n“The energy and spirit of innovation that’s focused on the insurance industry will surely benefit consumers and businesses who continue to rely on our industry to provide an essential foundation for financial stability. On the exhibit floor we saw an increased focus on quality user experiences and AI-enhanced tools. In our conversations and product demos we were reminded that we’re all better together.”\n– Fanette Singer, Chief Marketing Officer, Convr\nAlongside the big brands at ITC, our team was creating a buzz with boots on the ground. We were – and remain laser-focused on improving commercial insurance decisioning and efficiency with meaningful shared learning and lasting relationships.\nIf you missed us on-site – we still welcome you to meet with us for a demo and learn how we can integrate with your new or legacy technology – to bring you to the cutting edge of the future of insurance. Explore our product offerings here on Convr.com/platform.

The intersection of insights and innovation . . . that’s right; we’re talking about InsureTech Connect (ITC) 2022 in Las Vegas. Since attending last year’s ITC conference, Convr has been hard at work unleashing new ways to delight customers with . . .\n1) New scoring models that help underwriters better predict negative loss events2) Increased data security and a move to the cloud3) An enhanced partnership model supported by a full-service customer experience team4) Convr Insights BI module (Snowflake Data Cloud) enhanced data cards such as LRO\nAnd while we’ve missed some of you over the past year, we’ve enjoyed building on our great relationships with current customers and new potential users, too. Convr has special relationships with some of the top insurers in the U.S. We also have great relationships with some smaller organizations with big aspirations for the future. We know customer success drives Convr success, that’s why our customer experience and business development teams listen to our customers, learn from their feedback and help adapt our platform to better meet their needs.\nWith rolled sleeves (or t-shirts), together with our customers we dig into their challenges and known opportunities to uncover new paths to success. What we know at the outset is that our end-to-end, AI underwriting platform delivers insights far greater than you’d get from a pure data dump.\nThe Convr platform delivers a Management Framework that successfully infuses machine learning throughout the submission ingestion, prioritization and risk selection process. As we aim to digitally transform the insurance industry with artificial intelligence and data science, we know at the end of the day, the transformation is for the betterment of people – people who underwrite the policies, collect policy holder information and the policy holders themselves who will benefit from a better overall commercial underwriting experience.\nWhile nothing makes us happier than talking about our technology and product offerings, it’s really the relationships we’ve built and continue to build with commercial insurance providers that delights us the most. We will always depend on these deep connections to continue to make Convr the leading AI company serving commercial insurance organizations.\nAt Convr, our passion is building a new view of the future. If you’re looking to transform the way your team manages commercial insurance underwriting, visit us at InsureTech Connect in Las Vegas at the Mandalay Bay, Bayside B, MR-21 the week of September 19.\nWe’re excited to learn how we can help your organization envision new capabilities and solutions with Convr at your side.\nMeantime, learn more about Convr at www.convr.com

Reducing costs and underwriter defections became a prime focus for commercial carriers in the past year. Record high inflation and market volatility, mixed with talks of a recession have insurers on edge, tightening their belts and leaning in. Now more than ever, the need for resiliency, reliable processes, deeper insights and adaptability are pushing senior leaders to think beyond their current operations and into the future to meet their business objectives. And a lot of them are coming to the same conclusion. They recognize the need for digitalization, AI and the technologies that can help them operate more efficiently.

Issues in Underwriting

For many commercial lines operations, data collection is a time consuming and manual process. With so much internal and external information about current and potential insureds, the act of underwriting is hampered by the onerous process of manually gathering, reviewing, and analyzing information.\nConsider the many steps involved in collecting this data: pulling it from multiple sources including third party vendors and policy administration systems, and accessing various websites to supplement their decision-making process. The list also includes public, social, regulatory and subscription sites.\nBut with Convr, underwriters can catapult through the clutter. Our Fusion and d3 Risk 360 capabilities fuse data from various sources and deliver it for underwriting analysis. From the very start of the process, our AI underwriting platform demonstrates improved results in terms of reduced time spent on research and administrative tasks, more consistency in processes, better risk insights and underwriter work satisfaction.\nBoth new business and renewal underwriters benefit from the automatic aggregation of the consistent and comprehensive information necessary for risk analysis and decision making. You’re probably asking, how is this possible?

What is d3 Risk 360?

Convr’s d3 Risk 360 is a relational data lake comprised of information on millions of businesses, delivering underwriting teams with detailed insights from tens of thousands of data sources.

With d3 Risk 360 you can:

Visualize a deeper applicant view

Access a comprehensive view of a business's digital footprint drawn from thousands of data sources including local, state, and federal government information, social media, business websites and thousands of others to better inform decision making.

Determine risk fitness with greater efficiency

Harness Convr’s centralized command center that brings together your data and insights into our purpose-built data lake for more informed decisioning.

Glean deeper understanding

Gain powerful insights using Convr’s data cards that surface key insights, by category and by line-of-business, to reach better decisions.\nAnd that’s what carriers want, right? Frictionless underwriting, improved data and decisioning in real time – digital technology solutions that result in a better experience for underwriters and customers through deeper insights.\nWith Convr, the choice is easy. Our customers have exceeded their business goals by . . .

• Reducing application questions by more than 70%
• Improving underwriting productivity by +10x
• Increasing efficiency by over 130%

If you need more proof, read one of our case studies. Encova Insurance, Penn National Insurance, Tangram Insurance, and others have all come forward with evidence of strong returns on investment in as little as four to six weeks with Convr.\nIn a time of growing economic uncertainty, commercial carriers need to make the leap to investment in digital technology to better manage their submission volume at steady or reduced cost. Convr AI is a key technology that can directly support business strategies. The return on investment is clear.

At Convr, we believe achieving underwriting and operational excellence demand innovation and thought leadership from platform to data.

Background

Commercial Insurance Underwriters collect and analyze a broad array of sources to support their underwriting decisions. These sources of information can be broadly classified into:

1. First party documentation shared by agents and insureds (submissions)
2. Digital footprint (public/open data, third party)
3. In-house data (historical claims, underwriting guidelines, etc.)

Challenges facing underwriting teams

It is no secret that aggregating all of these sources and making sense of it all is a very manual and cumbersome process. Some of our observations about the current state also include:

1. Manual effort to organize this information means that underwriting teams sometimes have to make trade-offs on level of data capture e.g. large vs. smaller accounts
2. What is information collected and how it is organized (structure and quality) can vary across underwriting teams (even within business units)
3. Most of this valuable data is transient and sometimes, entirely lost, based on the final disposition of the insurance application e.g. quote not taken, declinations etc.
4. Compiling this information is a point-in-time exercise with limited access and insights into changes in the underlying data e.g. new services from a business that could materially impact pricing decisions

The opportunity

Companies can address these challenges in part by increasing the efficiency of capturing the required data with underwriting automation, including document extraction methodologies, RPA etc. While this is a step in the right direction, it doesn't address the most valuable opportunity. Developing a consistent approach to organize, maintain, and analyze the wealth of information aggregated in the underwriting process is essential to achieving excellence in other areas, including claims processing, fraud analysis, premium audit, pricing and analytics.

Our best practice approach

The key to success is to invest in capabilities that support near-term improvements in speed and efficiency gains but in parallel, drive to unleash the value of underwriting data across the organization. Adopting an AI underwriting data platform such as Convr enables insurance companies to do exactly that.\nOur products are built on the concept of knowledge graphing. According to IBM, information – “ie. Objects, events, situations, or concepts . . .” are collected in a way that “illustrates the relationship between them. This information is usually stored in a graph database and visualized as a graph structure.”\nWhat this means for insurance organizations is that all information captured during the underwriting process (documents, extractions, public data, etc.) is organized into a graph database. Graphs capture both the "point-in-time" information, and they're also, continually updated to capture changes. The graph data is made available to users and readily accessible through traditional Extract Transform Load (ETL) pipelines and cloud warehouses such as Snowflake.\nWhile knowledge graphs may not be exactly top-of-mind for underwriting teams, as a product "for underwriters by underwriters," we have supercharged the underlying bones of our product suite to deliver the greatest value to the entire insurance value chain.\n

Inflation forcing premium increases and exposure uncertainty

Rising inflation is forcing insurers to consider rate adequacy. When determining insurance premiums, insurers consider the cost to repair or replace things such as business property, equipment, and vehicles. When the costs for those rise, the price of insurance premiums often increase with it.\nFrom 2017 through 2020, premium rates rose 11.4% on average across the U.S.\nBut inflation isn’t the only reason for the spike—the pandemic-driven supply-chain disruptions are also adding to the mix. Rising costs for building materials, the chip shortage, labor costs and more are adding to the bottom line and insurers are adjusting policyholders’ premiums accordingly. For businesses that could be an additional financial burden; a hit to the bottom line that may force them to realign their priorities.\nFor insurers, increased efficiency and better risk insights can help control costs and ensure price adequacy in addition to gaining a competitive advantage. To solve for this, insurers are turning to Convr, an AI underwriting platform that digitizes and fuses submissions with best sources of data to surface underwriting insights, business classification and risk scores. With Convr, commercial insurance operations gain efficiency in their underwriting operations, transparency on submission data—including loss run information, and consistency through their workflows.\nTo sum it up, we facilitate low touch, error free underwriting for commercial carriers of all sizes. Convr removes operational burden from underwriting staff, allowing resources to focus where their talents are needed most instead of wasting hours doing administrative work. Convr also offers access to third party data that integrates, enhances, and facilitates the entire process from submission to decision.\nThe results? Convr provides a frictionless underwriting experience, delivers more accurate data to reduce an insurers’ loss ratio and provides world-class customer engagement. Convr’s AI-enhanced underwriting data platform benefits employees, management, producers, and customers. Implementations usually take less than 90 days.