Resources
Blog
March 14, 2023
xx min read

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.

blogs

Keep Reading

More articles on AI, underwriting and the future of commercial P&C.

XX MIN READ

Glean Insights on Hard-to-Find Small Businesses with Convr’s Biz Intel Feature

A huge portion of commercial property and casualty (P&C) insurance applicants barely exist online. Many small and mid-size commercial insureds (the bread and butter of commercial insurance underwriting) are nearly invisible online.

Think about it . . . landscapers, contractors, florists and more. The  food truck owners, small town auto mechanics and mom and pop shops . . . many don’t have:

  • a website
  • a strong social media presence
  • consistent business filings
  • complete insurance applications

Underwriting team members call this a low digital footprint risk and it’s a problem for them. When the submission comes in, they need to know if the business is real, if the owners do what they claim to do, and if the exposure is what the agent says it is.

But if the business has no digital presence, the underwriter is lost without their normal verification tools including website and online reviews, access to pertinent safety records and satellite exposure checks as well as prior filings.

That’s where Convr’s AI Underwriting Workbench shines. With our Biz Intel web search feature for low digital footprint companies, that hard to find information easily turns up for the underwriter within our underwriting platform. ‍

The Convr Underwriting Workbench’s Biz Intel can uncover:‍

1) Business Classification

2) Appetite relevant exposures

3) Number of employees

4) Revenue

It turns an unknown into a knowable risk, giving the underwriter the opportunity to decide whether or not to write the risk rather than to spend time investigating it further. It’s a shortcut for underwriting team members of all levels as they spend less time searching for the details that move the decision.‍

All in one place:‍

In the Convr AI Underwriting Workbench, every new submission with the web option enabled, runs Biz Intel and returns the results inline. The hard-to-find details land next to the submission you're working on, not three tabs away from it.‍

Why it matters:‍

Low-digital-footprint submissions take time that underwriters often can't justify spending. Enrichment surfaces the missing data automatically, so accounts that would have been deprioritized – or declined for lack of information – become writable.‍

Convr’s Biz Intel users get:

1) First-quote advantage: Brokers place business with the first to quote. If your underwriting team is out searching Google, the Secretary of State, checking maps and emailing questions – you could be missing out on deals. With Convr AI data enrichment, the data comes to the underwriter instead of the other way around – and the first quote is more often yours.‍

2) Reduced referral dependency: When reliable information on low digital footprint companies is available in the file, more submissions can be decided where they land. Junior underwriters escalate only the accounts that genuinely need a second set of eyes. Senior underwriters spend their time on the complex risks and judgment calls that actually require their experience – not on questions a richer file would have answered on its own. Across the team, consistency improves and cycle times tighten.‍

3) Greater portfolio profitability: This is the real return on investment. Commercial carriers rarely lose money on catastrophic risks. Instead, they lose money on thousands of slightly mispriced/misunderstood small and mid-size policies – and low-visibility insureds are exactly where this is most common.

Convr's AI Underwriting Workbench isn't a productivity system. It's a loss ratio control system. If thin-file submissions are costing your team time or premium, we should talk – visit us at convr.com today.

XX MIN READ

Convr Accelerates MGA Growth

From Intake automation efficiency to data modeling for hidden insights, Convr is helping Managing General Agents (MGAs) turn fragmented submission documents into structured, enriched data – accelerating clearance, rating, and quote times to unleash profitable growth.

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!

XX MIN READ

Convr® Evolves Data Catalog for Faster, More Transparent Underwriting

Convr®, took a leap toward delivering the next big advancement in artificial intelligence (AI) underwriting through the enhanced performance and usability improvements of its Data Catalog within its commercial insurance underwriting workbench in 2026. Convr’s Data Catalog makes it easier for underwriting team members to discover the thousands of data sources that are compiled in Convr’s Risk 360 data lake.\nThe leading artificial intelligence (AI) company serving commercial insurance organizations with its underwriting workbench implemented a new view for the company’s Data Catalog which aligns with its commitment to transform the commercial insurance underwriting industry and enables frictionless underwriting.\nWithin the model, users can easily glean insights from its extensive list of nearly 3,000 external data sources. Underwriters can also search across all Convr data sources, filter through the list by location, and view detailed information about each source with greater clarity. This new format allows users to quickly understand what data is available and how frequently it is refreshed.\nWhat it shows:The Data Catalog displays detailed information about each data source, including:

  • Source name
  • Data type
  • Source update frequency
  • Convr update frequency
  • State
  • Last updated date

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.

Realize End-to-End Underwriting Excellence with Convr AI

Experience how commercial P&C insurance organizations benefit from submission through quote with a frictionless process enriched by AI decisioning, empowering them to make better decisions, faster.