August 27, 2019
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DataCubes and St. Joseph University Forge Research Collaboration

AI & machine learning research & academic partnership with St Joseph University Maguire Academy of Risk and Insurance Management - Haub School of Business to advance AI

CHICAGO (Aug. 27, 2019) - DataCubes, the leading decision automation platform that helps commercial P&C insurance carriers automate intelligence gathering, discover important underwriting insights and make better underwriting decisions in near real-time, today announced a collaborative partnership with St. Joseph University, one of the top insurance schools in the country.

Through the relationship, DataCubes and St. Joseph University’s Risk Management and Insurance program will collaborate to design, implement and monitor a mutually beneficial research program. The program, which aims to build on existing insights and broaden research in the field of AI and machine learning, will initially focus on bringing DataCubes’ technology to the classroom.

DataCubes’ d3 Underwriting™ platform, which uses AI and machine learning to help commercial insurance carriers optimize and automate the underwriting decision process, will be integrated into the students’ curriculum. DataCubes will help facilitate research projects, offering guidance and mentorship, best practices on innovation, as well as internships to St. Joseph’s Risk and Insurance Management students. The partners will also collaborate on the university’s annual insurtech symposium.

“St. Joseph University’s Risk Management and Insurance program consistently ranks in the top five undergraduate insurance programs in the country and we are thrilled to be sharing expertise and working with some of the best scientific minds in the country,” said Harish Neelamana, DataCubes co-founder and chief product officer. “The research we do together will have the potential to influence the evolution of the entire industry!”
“This immersive program will nurture talent, ideas and discoveries,” said Michael Angelina, executive director of the Academy of Risk Management and Insurance at Saint Joseph’s University. “We look forward to working with DataCubes on our vision to bridge academia and business with the goal of developing talent and advancing the insurance industry.”

The mission of the Maguire Academy of Insurance and Risk Management is to promote and support the concept of risk management and insurance education; to provide services to risk management and insurance students, including scholarship aid, recruiting, internships/cooperative education, counseling and placement; and, with and through the University, to support the Department of Finance, which houses the risk management and insurance program.

About DataCubes

Headquartered in Schaumburg, Illinois, and founded in 2016 by Kuldeep Malik and Harish Neelamana, DataCubes is the first decision automation platform for commercial P&C underwriting. The company has revolutionized the commercial underwriting process with cutting-edge AI and data science. Commercial carriers of all sizes use DataCubes to make real-time underwriting decisions based on rich data and highly accurate intelligence gathered by external sources to improve productivity, profitability, efficiency and accuracy. To learn more, visit datacubes.com.

About Maguire Academy of Insurance and Risk Management

Created by James Maguire ’58, founder of Philadelphia Insurance Company, the mission of the Maguire Academy of Insurance and Risk Management is to promote and support the concept of risk management and insurance education; to provide services to risk management and insurance students, including scholarship aid, recruiting, internships/cooperative education, counseling and placement; and, with and through the University, to support the Department of Finance, which houses the risk management and insurance program.

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XX MIN READ

Convr® Partners with Property Guardian to Bring Advanced Wildfire Intelligence Directly into the AI Underwriting Workbench

CHICAGO (June 16, 2026) – Convr®, the leading AI company serving commercial insurance organizations with its modular underwriting workbench, today announced a strategic partnership with Property Guardian, the wildfire risk analytics platform from Green Shield Holdings. Through the agreement, Property Guardian's property-level wildfire intelligence will be available directly within the Convr AI Underwriting Workbench, giving underwriters the data they need to confidently select, price, and monitor wildfire-exposed risks without interrupting their workflow.

Wildfires have become one of the most consequential and fastest-evolving perils in property insurance, reshaping appetite, capacity, and pricing across the western United States and beyond. Underwriters increasingly need transparent, defensible, property-level wildfire data to write business in exposed markets, rather than declining accounts or relying on generic regional risk scores. By integrating Property Guardian into Convr's workbench, customers gain a unified view of submission data, enriched business intelligence, and wildfire-specific risk insights, all in one place.

What the partnership delivers

Convr’s Property Guardian users can expect:

  • Property-level wildfire risk insights — including structure, parcel, community, and regional analytics — surfaced inline within Convr submissions
  • Access to Property Guardian's analytics, built on exclusive data partnerships with leading wildfire modeling and imagery providers
  • Faster, more defensible underwriting decisions in wildfire-exposed markets, with the ability to expand appetite into accounts that might otherwise have been declined for lack of clarity
  • Reduced reliance on costly in-person loss control inspections
  • A unified workflow that combines Convr's intake, enrichment, classification, and decisioning capabilities incorporating Property Guardian's specialized wildfire analytics
“Wildfire risk has fundamentally changed how property underwriters need to think about selection and pricing, and our customers have been clear that they want trusted wildfire intelligence available at the point of decision, not three tabs away," said John Stammen, Chief Executive Officer at Convr. "Property Guardian brings the depth of wildfire science, modeling, and expertise that complements the Convr AI Underwriting Workbench. Together, we're giving underwriters the clarity to write more business confidently in some of the most challenging markets in the country."

“Convr is transforming how commercial insurance organizations move from submission intake to underwriting decision, and this partnership brings Property Guardian’s wildfire intelligence directly into that workflow,” said Pat Blandford, Founder & CEO of Property Guardian. “Wildfire-exposed business does not have to be an automatic decline. With the right property-level data, underwriters can better understand risk, identify where mitigation and resilience matter, and make faster, more defensible decisions. Together with Convr, we’re helping carriers and MGAs bring greater clarity, consistency, and confidence to one of the industry’s most challenging perils.”

The integration is available to Convr customers immediately. Carriers and MGAs interested in learning more can visit convr.com or contact their Convr representative.

About Property Guardian

Property Guardian (part of Green Shield Holdings) delivers advanced wildfire analytics that help carriers, MGAs, and insurance professionals select, price, and mitigate risk in wildfire-exposed markets. By combining cutting-edge science with exclusive data partnerships, Property Guardian transforms thousands of wildfire signals into clear, actionable insights at the property level. Our intelligence supports smarter underwriting and portfolio management across the entire insurance lifecycle. Learn more at www.propertyguardian.com.

XX MIN READ

Convr® Unveils the Risk Context Engine, Grounding AI Underwriting in a Commercial P&C Knowledge Graph and Ontology

CHICAGO (June 9, 2026) – Convr® today unveiled the Convr Risk Context Engine (RCE), the industry's first knowledge graph and semantic ontology built specifically for commercial property and casualty (P&C) underwriting. Calibrated on a decade of production data and more than 2,500 integrated sources, the RCE powers every AI capability across the Convr AI Underwriting Workbench and gives carriers and MGAs the grounded, explainable foundation that agentic and generative AI alone cannot provide.

Carriers, MGAs and brokers are evaluating agentic agents, generative assistants, and large language models at an unprecedented pace. Most of these tools share a critical weakness: they are built on general-purpose foundation models with limited understanding of commercial insurance and not calibrated on real underwriting environments. The result is AI that can be inaccurate, inconsistent, irreplicable, and unexplainable. Underwriters, chief underwriting officers, and regulators cannot accept those qualities in risk decisioning.

The Convr RCE solves that problem. Built and refined since Convr's first founding, the RCE is a commercial P&C knowledge graph and semantic ontology that encodes the language, structures, exposures, classifications, and decision logic of underwriting into a unified, machine-readable model, calibrated against a decade of real submissions, real exposures, and real underwriter feedback from leading carriers in production. Every AI capability in the Convr workbench from intake to business classification, risk scoring, data enrichment, and workflows, runs on top of the RCE. The result is AI that doesn't just sound right. It is right, and can prove it: every classification, appetite call, and risk-score output traces back through the ontology to the source submission documents, loss data, and underwriter decisions that informed it.

The regulatory direction is reinforcing the value of RCE. The NAIC Model Bulletin on the Use of Artificial Intelligence Systems by Insurers, now adopted in some form by roughly half of US states, requires governance, transparency, and accountability for AI in regulated underwriting decisions, with parallel frameworks in New York, Colorado, and others. Those outcomes are not achievable on top of black-box inference; they require AI grounded in an inspectable knowledge graph and ontology of the underwriting domain. That is exactly what the RCE provides, with every decision traceable to the ontology and source data behind it.

"The industry is having the wrong conversation about AI in underwriting," said John Stammen, Chief Executive Officer of Convr. "Everyone talks about models. The real question is what they're grounded in. Without a commercial P&C knowledge graph and ontology underneath them, generative and agentic AI are confident guessers. The RCE supplies the missing context . . . what a submission means, what an exposure is, what an underwriter decides and turns outputs into decisions a carrier can defend. This is exactly what Convr has been building since 2016."

Availability
The RCE powers all Convr AI Underwriting Workbench deployments today. Carriers, MGAs and brokers interested in learning more can visit convr.com or contact a Convr representative.

Media Contact
Alex Williams
Senior Promotions Manager
alex.williams@convr.com
217-737-2782

XX MIN READ

New Convr Survey Reveals a Confidence Gap in Commercial P&C: Carriers Are Adopting AI Faster Than They Can Build a Strategy for It.

CHICAGO (June 2, 2026) — Convr®, the leading AI underwriting workbench purpose-built for commercial P&C insurance, today released findings from its 2026 Convr Insurance Talent and Tech Trends Survey, revealing a striking gap between how quickly carriers are adopting AI in underwriting and how confident they are in the strategy guiding that adoption.

The survey of 211 commercial insurance professionals — including a majority at the leadership, vice president, and executive levels — found that AI adoption in underwriting is accelerating across the industry, yet strategic clarity is lagging.

The pace of adoption is undeniable:

  • 89.5% of respondents expect more underwriting tasks to be automated in the coming years
  • 70.6% delivered new AI underwriting tools to their teams in 2025
  • 65.9% plan to deliver additional AI tools in 2026
  • 53.6% have AI deployed in at least one production underwriting workflow

But strategic confidence has not kept pace:

  • Only 20.4% of leaders are "highly confident" their organization has a clear, actionable AI strategy for underwriting
  • More than 40% rate themselves in the bottom half of the confidence scale
  • 56.9% describe their organizational culture toward AI as "cautiously open — interested but wanting proof before commitment"
"The industry has crossed a threshold," said John Stammen, Chief Executive Officer at Convr. "AI in commercial underwriting is no longer a question of whether, but a question of how. What our survey reveals is that while carriers are moving quickly to deploy AI tools, many are doing so without the strategic framework to ensure those investments deliver lasting business outcomes.”

That gap between adoption and strategy is the single biggest risk facing commercial P&C leaders today, and it's also the biggest opportunity. The carriers who close it first will define the next decade of underwriting, according to Stammen.

The survey also surfaced the operational realities driving urgency around AI adoption. Respondents pointed to manual data entry (35.1%), dated and legacy technology (27.5%), and too many submission data sources (24.6%) as the leading factors slowing underwriting at their companies today. Meanwhile, 63% of carriers operate on hybrid technology environments — a legacy core with cloud-based tools layered on top — underscoring why a unified, AI underwriting workbench has become a strategic imperative rather than a nice-to-have.

Stammen noted that beneath Convr’s underwriting workbench is a data-first architecture purpose-built for commercial underwriting, not an AI layer bolted onto legacy systems. At its core is Convr’s Risk Context Engine, a unified intelligence framework that connects structured and unstructured submission data, business logic, and AI models into a single source of truth, grounding AI decisions in real underwriting context rather than generic output. Powering the engine is Risk 360, Convr’s proprietary insurance data lake, with 10 years of historical underwriting data continuously enriched by more than 2,500 public and private sources and 785 million data points on 87 million companies. Together, they give carriers what point AI tools cannot — a strategic foundation that turns AI adoption into repeatable, measurable underwriting outcomes.

When asked what would most benefit their underwriting teams, respondents pointed to AI tool training (47.4%), pre-screened and enriched submissions (46.9%), and simplified access to data (45.5%) — all areas where Convr's modular workbench is actively helping carriers close the strategy-to-execution gap today.

"Strategy without execution is theory. Execution without strategy is chaos," said Stammen. "Convr was built to give carriers both a clear path from where their underwriting operates today to where it needs to be tomorrow."

About the 2026 Convr Insurance Survey

The 2026 Convr Insurance Survey was conducted in April and reflects responses from 211 commercial insurance professionals working in property and casualty, with strong representation from leadership (35.1%), VP/Executive (37%), and management (42.2%) roles across carriers, MGAs, brokerages, and specialty markets.

For more information, visit convr.com.

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