Tech quickening underwriting and pricing, product development

Las Vegas – Technology is helping speed up the processes of underwriting and pricing, and product development in the commercial insurance industry while also bringing in new talent, several sources said during a panel discussion Wednesday at the annual Insuretech Connect conference.

“I think we’ve seen fantastic differences over the past 10, 20, 30 years,” said Duncan Anderson, Reigate, England-based global leader, insurance technology for Willis Towers Watson PLC. Advances in hardware include chip design optimized for a specific task, he noted.

Lindsey Joosten, Portsmouth, New Hampshire-based vice president and senior director of global underwriting technology for Liberty Mutual Insurance Co., said the abundance of data and application programming interfaces, or APIs, has made rating and pricing more efficient.

Property catastrophe modeling for a specific account, which could have previously taken up to 24 hours just a few years ago, can now be done in as little as 10 minutes, Mr. Joosten said.

“We can now, within minutes, rate and price quotations,” said Chetan Gautam, Malvern, Pennsylvania-based head of global pricing platforms and data for Chubb Ltd.

Taffy Jo Mayers, global commercial lines leader for WTW, noted that technology adoption by the insurance industry can also serve as a recruiting tool, bringing new talent into the industry.

She added that some newer products, such as usage-based insurance products, began life in the personal lines side of the business.