This article was originally written by Avanade alum James Harrison.

The pandemic has been a topsy-turvy ride for insurance carriers and brokers. According to numbers from Accenture, in just one month (March/April 2020, the start of the first lockdown for most countries) the average insurer lost 41% of its market capitalisation in Europe and North America.

COVID caused The Lloyd’s of London trading room to close for the first time in 300 years. At the same time, Lloyd’s of London re-launched its own electronic placing platform (PPL), the system that lets brokers and insurers quote, negotiate, bind and endorse business digitally.

For 300 years, the insurance subscription market has been run on a mixture of face-to-face meetings and paper documents. But a plan was in place to bring the insurance carriers and brokers into the digital age. Lloyd’s of London’s roadmap clearly pointed to a transformation to a digital marketplace. Early adopters stood to make the greatest gains.

Then came the pandemic, and the overnight move from paper-based office working to 100% digital remote working. The plans had to be put into practice. Insurance industry employees, once accustomed to passing hard copies of documents from department to department within a fixed office space, had to rely entirely on email and the new PPL system. For insurance carriers and brokers, digital became the new normal.

When viewed through the lens of digital transformation and technological progress, the pandemic has been a force for good: “We’ve seen two years’ worth of digital transformation in two months” said Microsoft’s Satya Nadella in April 2020.

Strike while the iron’s hot
The pandemic combined with the existing push forward with PPL mean the insurance subscription market has entered the digital age proper. But we’ve only just begun.

This accelerated digital progress gives carriers and brokers an unmissable opportunity to lay the groundwork for powerful growth in the near future. AI, machine learning and ‘software robots’ can automate manual, time-consuming processes and give time back to underwriters. The efficiency gains and cost savings can be significant. But how can it be achieved? Is this pie-in-the-sky thinking or proven, real-world technology? Let’s find out.

Introducing Avanade’s Underwriter Experience insurance accelerator
Avanade’s dedicated insurance sector team have been developing multiple tools based on class-leading Microsoft products to speed up common insurance carriers and broker processes. The result of this work is our ‘insurance accelerator’, called Underwriter Experience (UX).

UX leverages the Microsoft Power Platform to save time at every stage of the underwriting workflow, from receiving a submission and offering a quote to receiving a firm order from the broker.

Additionally, UX provides a single tasks dashboard from which an underwriter can complete risk management controls, compliance related activities, and much more.

Using the flexibility of Microsoft Power Apps, UX is fully extensible: insurers can use their own in-house development teams to push the functionality even further, giving you the option to use additional third-party datasets to increase competitiveness and profitability.

Underwriter Experience isn’t just for underwriters; it can be configured for wider user across departments and business processes to improve accuracy, efficiency, and reporting. It can give you an ‘as it happens view’ across your organisation, giving you real-time data on claims, finance, risk, compliance, actuarial, and more.

According to Avanade’s own research, senior insurance executives estimate that workplace transformation tools – like Underwriter Experience – have the potential to increase revenues by 16% and reduce costs by 13%. To learn more, please listen to the latest on-demand webinar with Microsoft.

Why use Avanade Underwriter Experience?

• A single tool to manage your business across multiple systems, solutions and people
• Automate pre-bind activities, technical pricing, risk modelling, Controls
• Data and insights at the point of risk selection
• Future-proofed for Lloyd’s of London, PPL, Whitespace, Broker Portals, etc.

Why Avanade?
Avanade works with 9 of the 10 largest global insurers by sales on the Forbes Global 2000 list. And we work with eight of the top 10 property and casualty insurers. Our expertise with Microsoft technology is globally recognised, making us the ideal systems integration partner for your insurance or insurance carrier organisation.

We helped one health insurer reduce average document handling time by over 50% in a department of 70 people by applying a cognitive computing solution to the workflow platform.

These kinds of results aren’t uncommon. The insurance subscription market really is evolving in front of our eyes.

If you’d like to find out more about Underwriter Experience and arrange a demo, contact me today: james.harrison@avanade.com