Cost performance for P&C insurance has not improved in 15 years, according to McKinsey. Slow time-to-market of new products has become a major barrier to profitability. Deloitte found that insurers typically require 12 to 18 months to create a new product, and three to six months to modify existing coverage.

Why is the underwriting process currently so burdensome? Typically, underwriters are forced to work with—or are otherwise overly reliant on—manual processes across multiple, disconnected legacy systems. Having to enter data multiple times in multiple places leads to high error rates, slow quote turnaround times, and a lack of visibility. Unfortunately, data intake isn’t always consistent, so underwriters are left with a mess that they have to clean up—manually. 

During the development process for new products, any misalignments between what the customer expects and what the engineer is building may be found too late. Since it takes up to a year and a half to develop a product, it may not even be what the client wants or needs anymore by the time it is ready.

To keep up with the volatility of climate change, pandemics, and other marketplace disruptions, P&C carriers must be able to rapidly develop innovative business models and products. Employee productivity is an indispensable differentiator among competing providers, and insurers must focus on increasing underwriter productivity while decreasing costs. When it comes to launching new products, there needs to be more collaboration between business and technology teams. However, the complexity of code and all of its required expertise does not allow for fast, iterative development.  

To remain competitive, insurers must invest in digital transformation and overhaul their complex, manual processes. The same McKinsey analysis found that the most successful carriers leveraged the latest technologies to optimize their underwriting capabilities.

We will take a deeper dive into the five main underwriting challenges—and discuss how they can be solved with the power of no-code application development.