Encova Case Study
Encova Insurance Partners with Convr to Accelerate Underwriting Excellence
Learn how Convr enables Encova to:
- Help its underwriters save time—spending less than half the time they used to reviewing submissions
- Support a culture of underwriting excellence
- Retain and attract talent by investing in digitally enabled employee experiences
Three ways Convr enables underwriting excellence
Convr provides the missing piece
Convr provided the missing piece that Encova was looking for. Convr’s end-to-end underwriting management system augments Encova’s current underwriting capabilities and enables the carrier to support a culture of underwriting excellence.
The flexibility of Convr’s solutions was especially important for Encova, given the complexities of its post-affiliation IT environment, allowing it to progress to underwriting excellence one piece at a time.
“It’s easy; it works well. Underwriters get multiple data points through d3 Risk 360 and d3 Answers, and that allows our team to be more timely and efficient, more productive.”
Mike Lucas Chief Underwriting Officer, Encova Insurance
"Our typical avenues for research didn’t uncover this information, but Convr did."
Convr helps Encova avoid unwanted exposure
“I learned the value of Convr early on, when one of my first searches with d3 Risk 360 uncovered a hidden trucking exposure.
We were covering all vehicles on the policy. We found out the main entity on our policy was a holding company, and that holding company had entities with for-hire trucking exposures. Our typical avenues for research didn’t uncover this information, but Convr did. The agent was then able to inquire and learned that these other entities didn’t have insurance.
Without Convr, we would have learned about this additional risk exposure after writing the policy, when we would have requested a federal motor carrier filing. Convr allowed us to avoid a risk we otherwise wouldn’t have priced for or contemplated.”
Amy Gilmore
Vice President,
Commercial Underwriting,
Encova Insurance
Solutions for new business submissions
Encova selected two Convr solutions for new business submissions in its commercial P&C lines
d3 Risk 360™
Manual research is time-consuming and error-prone. With d3 Risk 360, Encova’s underwriters get instant access to the full digital footprint of a business—based on a single search of name and business address.
d3 Answers™
Submission applications include many underwriting questions, many of them complex. With d3 Answers, Encova’s underwriting team gets automatic answers to chosen underwriting questions, reducing friction in the submission process—while also improving accuracy.
d3 Answers™ enables Encova to:
Unlock the power of pre-fill
With d3 Answers, submission applications are pre-filled in sub-seconds, boosting agent productivity, positioning Encova as a carrier of choice and enabling straight-through processing (STP).
Automatically classify submission applications
d3 Answers helps underwriters to select and rate risks more efficiently, by classifying submissions based on business activity and risk exposure.
Encova taps Convr to address workers’ compensation priorities
“We’re constantly looking for enhanced intelligence to support better pricing in workers’ compensation. d3 Risk 360 and d3 Answers will help us achieve that. After seeing how Convr’s solutions moved the needle for my colleagues in commercial lines, plus the ease of plugging Convr’s API into our agent portal, this was a natural fit.”
Jeff Benintendi
Executive Vice President,
Workers Compensation & Strategic
Accounts, Encova Insurance
Convr is helping Encova address its priorities for workers’ compensation: to use pre-fill to streamline and speed up the submission process; leverage third-party data sources to augment risk understanding; and achieve transformation at scale across Encova’s 28-state geography.
Innovating to realize underwriting excellence
Using d3 Risk 360 and d3 Answers, Encova has continued to demonstrate its commitment to innovation. How? By implementing a portion of Convr’s end-to-end underwriting management system and further its aim of realizing underwriting excellence.
In particular, Encova can now:
- Increase underwriting acumen and efficiency. Convr’s AI solutions help Encova remove friction from the agent and insured experience. Underwriters can now quickly identify underwriting risk characteristics and generate a quote using minimal input.
- Support a culture of underwriting excellence that retains talent. Encova is demonstrating it is dedicated to equipping underwriters with advanced tools that empower them to achieve their best.
- Work more effectively with agents. Encova continues to invest in improving the quality of life for its agents—by streamlining the agent experience, providing tools to enable agents to focus on value-added activities and making it easier to place business with Encova.
- Drive profitable growth. Encova’s investment in its underwriting acumen will enable better risk management and a healthier book of business. In addition, the carrier can grow premiums through better underwriting efficiency and productivity, augment the customer experience with faster speed-toquote and strengthen agent relationships by reducing friction in the submission process.
This partnership enables Encova to remove friction from its underwriting experience, improve agent relationships, and retain and nurture underwriting talent. Importantly, the relationship lays the foundation for Encova to expand its applications into other lines of business—and grow the gains made in commercial lines.
“Talent can no longer be an afterthought for insurers.”
EY and ACORD, 2020 US P&C insurance performance analysis
When it comes to underwriting, manual processes and repetitive work aren’t just frustrating. They get in the way of underwriters doing what matters: writing and pricing risks appropriately, improving outcomes for agents and policyholders and driving profitability for the business.
Carriers that invest in a modern underwriting experience are demonstrating their workforce matters. An intuitive interface that allows underwriters to get the entire digital footprint of a business, from just name and address? That’s not just a tool for efficiency and productivity. That tells underwriters, “You matter, your time matters, and we are investing in your success.”
Carriers must provide a more engaging, responsive employee experience, not just to retain existing talent, but to attract people from the ranks of digitally native Millennials and Gen Z. In the end, there are two kinds of carriers in this world: those that attract and retain talent—and those that don’t.
Underwriting excellence drives business excellence
Underwriting is a core competency of insurance, and investments in underwriting excellence are investments in business excellence. Crucially, leveraging AI as part of a core underwriting management system can help carriers take critical steps on their journey of innovation and digital transformation.
In particular, AI can unlock new and more expansive ways of understanding risk.
In the short term, it can improve efficiency, operational excellence and risk selection capabilities, and enhance the underwriter, agent and policyholder experience. In the medium term, carriers can bring expanded data insights downstream to augment policy rating, renewal and other lines of business. Finally, in the long term, it enables carriers to gain competency with technology that is fundamentally changing the way the world works, lives and plays.
For Encova, a partnership with Convr was a natural fit—a fruitful relationship that is expanding, continuing to offer value, and supporting Encova in its pursuit of underwriting excellence.
In particular, AI can unlock new and more expansive ways of understanding risk.
Convr: End-to-end underwriting excellence for commercial P&C
Benefits experienced by our customers
What matters most to you?
Profitability
Expand capacity, gain competitive advantage and grow revenue with embedded business rules, better access to relevant data and improved decisioning.
Price Adequacy
Identify more or less risky submissions and segments in the specified population so pricing is more aligned with relative exposure.
Productivity
Prioritize submissions to rapidly narrow risks within appetite and deep dive on selected risks.
Customer Experience
Reduce data gathering touchpoints and the time associated with record retrieval and validation for applicants.
Loss Avoidance
Calibrate individual risks and predict those most likely to experience a loss in the coming year.
Underwriting Efficiency
Drive efficient submission intake, prioritization, underwriting analysis and decisioning with a full-suite of AI-infused commercial insurance tools.
Speed to Quote
Increase quote-ratios and new business by accelerating the underwriting process from intake to data collection to identifying the right submission questions and answers.
Underwriting Experience
Streamline the underwriters’ work experience with more complete and accurate data, clearer insights and heightened decision confidence.
Convr empowers carriers to meet four core needs:
d3 Intake™
Uses Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) such as ACORD applications to reduce manual data entry.
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d3 Risk 360™
Provides additional insights on risks from thousands of third-party data sources.
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d3 Answers™
Uses artificial intelligence (AI) to classify a business and respond to underwriting questions
d3 Score™
Enables risk selection and prioritization to better focus downstream underwriting resources.
Convr empowers P&C carriers with digital end-to- end underwriting management powered with a patented-AI decisioning engine that transforms the underwriting experience. Carriers of all sizes, including many of the tier 1 carriers, trust Convr to help them transform their underwriting experience with straight-through processing and more complete data to make better decisions.
Convr’s Underwriting Command center brings together data, discovery, and decision intelligence (Data. Discovery. Decision.TM) through its patented machine-learning algorithm engine so carriers like Crum & Forster, Selective and Hiscox are able to reduce application questions by over 70% and increase underwriting productivity by up to 10x.