The Underwriting Workbench: A Guide to Transforming the Insurance Value Chain

Underwriting is the bedrock of the insurance business. It’s also undergoing profound transformation. From AI to predictive analytics, technologies aren’t just changing how underwriters do their job. They’re radically changing the market landscape itself. 

For innovative firms, these new technologies are opening up new opportunities, from accelerated processes to the ability to quickly harness data and advanced analytics to support entirely new products and lines of business. Meanwhile, firms can deliver much more streamlined, connected, and automated experience to clients, brokers, and underwriters alike. 

Obviously, innovators have much to gain, from operational efficiencies to the ability to enter new markets and win new business. However, laggards beware. They can’t expect to compete effectively with traditional PASs (policy administration solutions) or niche underwriting solutions. These static solutions are not just designed to easily integrate the new technologies and businesses that are set to define the new competitive reality. 

Instead, leading firms are already implementing a new model—the underwriting workbench. An underwriting workbench is a digital platform that supports the underwriting end-to-end underwriting workflow, drives effective collaboration and helps insurers generate optimized products and policies at speed.  “In a world where adaptability reigns supreme, commercial line P&C insurers must embrace intelligent workbench solutions to not only survive, but to lead the charge in revolutionizing the insurance underwriting industry,” said Davide Palanza, research manager, IDC Financial Insights.

However, not all underwriting workbenches are created equal. Such a solution should meet both today’s challenges and deliver the flexibility required to rapidly adapt to tomorrow’s opportunities. That includes rapidly building customized products processes, easily integrating powerful new technologies and datasets, and above doing all these things without accumulating more technical debt—already a huge burden for the vast majority of IT teams.  

To help insurers make insightful choices as they modernize their underwriting processes, we created this guide, which covers: 

• The technologies transforming underwriting 
• The challenges firms face in transforming underwriting processes
• The limitations of PASs and niche solutions
• The three core capabilities of a modern underwriting workbench 
• The unique value of Unqork’s zero-code, full-platform solution 

1. The technologies reshaping underwriting

Theoretically, underwriters have access to far more data and much more sophisticated decisioning tools than ever. The massive proliferation in data and data types can fuel much more sophisticated, granular decisioning. AI tools can both enhance decisioning and help drive intelligent automation across underwriting operations. 

As detailed in the Celent’s 2024 report “Unlocking Underwriting Success, Global Edition: The Rise of Underwriting Workbenches,” a whole range of technologies are making this possible. 

• Next-generation data and decisioning tools can fuel better, more holistic cross-portfolio business outcomes. 
• Automation can now drive far more efficiency and scale. 
• Continuous underwriting is now possible by monitoring internal and external sources to enable rapid responses to changing conditions.  

The potential for innovation cannot be underestimated. “As insurers increasingly leverage AI-driven underwriting tools and data analytics, they can assess risks with unprecedented accuracy and speed, streamlining processes while reducing human error,” reports FinTech Global. 

2. The challenges firms face in transforming underwriting processes

Despite the wonderful possibilities, most underwriters still face limited access to better data and time-consuming manual processes. Approximately 41% of underwriters’ time is spent on administrative and operational activities, according to Capgemini’s World Property and Casualty Insurance Report 2024. Only 37% of insurers have advanced third-party data capabilities, the report also finds, while only 27% have advanced predictive modeling capabilities.

As a result, underwriters have less time to focus on generating net-new value and fewer tools to help them do so effectively. That means less time for high-value activities like price optimization, timely responses to broker and client requests, or the creation of new products or lines of business. 

What is holding insurers back? Celent’s report identifies the following factors:  

• Disconnected data & systems that slow time to market and force underwriters to spend much of their time on slow, manual, error-prone tasks. 
• Inflexible off-the-shelf solutions that don’t allow companies to leverage powerful new technologies or create customized differentiated solutions. 
• Misalignment between business and tech teams because business teams cannot play an intimate role in solution design, leading to solutions that don’t meet the precise needs of either customers or the business. 

This affects a wide range of insurance leaders trying to do their job. For example, CIOs can’t quickly implement the technology underwriters need. Chief Underwriting Officers and their teams lack the data and tools then need to both compete on price and approve requests for quotes as quickly as possible. Operations leads find themselves hardpressed to improve underwriting processes while still meeting key obligations like Know Your Customer (KYC). 

ons around know your customer (KYC), struggling with sanctions checks and more. And CEOs, charged with growing the business without increasing headcount, cannot count on the operational efficiencies and new revenue opportunities a modern underwriting workbench has the potential to support. 

3. The limitations of PASs and niche underwriting solutions 

As IDC analysts write, P&C insurers “face a host of challenges, from mounting regulatory pressures to complex risk assessments and growing customer expectations.” 

For example, margin pressures require a new level of operational efficiency and optimized decisioning both to lower costs and enable underwriters to drive revenue by servicing more accounts. And risk volatility, especially for catastrophic events, require underwriters to triage risks more effectively, requiring stronger decisioning tools

On top of this, insurers are expecting “mass retirement of a generation of underwriters whose legacy knowledge may just disappear with them,” according to Capgemini. 

Meanwhile, many insurers still rely on policy administration systems (PASs). They are very good at manufacturing a policy but they do not help the underwriters do the critical work of analyzing prior losses, financial condition, exposures, and controls. Niche underwriting solutions have tried to bridge the gap. 

However, the vast majority of these solutions lack the flexibility to integrate new technologies without significant development work, if at all. And that level of flexibility is exactly what is required to unlock the value of the new and evolving technologies and processes that are shaping the future of underwriting. 

4. The three core capabilities of a modern underwriting workbench 

An underwriting workbench should be able to address all these challenges addressed above, from the competitive demand for greater efficiency to powerful underwriting decisioning that harnesses all kinds of data and sophisticated analytical tools. Core 

• Process efficiency. An underwriting workbench should integrate and connect the underwriter’s tasks in a single work station to drive greater efficiency. In addition, it should leverage technologies, including AI, to automate manual tasks and frees up underwriting talent to focus on new business opportunities. 
• Optimized decisioning. To power sophisticated decisioning, an underwriting workbench should make it fast and easy to integrate and operationalize internal and external data sources as well as advanced analytic tools. In this way, underwriters can make better, more profitable underwriting decisions. They can also create new products and even lines of business with greater speed and confidence. 
• Enhanced experiences. The attraction and retention of clients, agents, brokers, and underwriters are core to creating value. A modern self-service UI will be increasingly critical in making this happen, as well as minimizing operational costs and risk, thanks to capabilities like built-in approval controls, audit trails, and more. 

With all these core capabilities, here are some of the benefits you can achieve: 

• Increase productivity and lower costs. By automating repetitive administrative tasks, underwriters can focus more on high-level underwriting analysis. 
• Accelerate time-to-market. When you speed underwriting processes while also maintaining or even increasing the quality of risk assessment and pricing, you also accelerate the creation of individual policies and the creation of new products and services. 
• Enhance price precision. By aggregate data and analytical insights from internal and external sources, you can drive greater consistency in underwriting decisioning, benchmark pricing with predictive analytics, including CAT modeling and profitability margins. 
• Attract and retain top talent. In the face of mass retirement, firms can increase their chance of attracting the most talented underwriters but freeing them up from mundane manual tasks and focus on the tasks that they enjoy most—and generate the greatest value.  

Firms are rapidly jumping on board, and the results speak for themselves. Commercial insurers who perform in the top quartile in terms of underwriting excellence achieve 13% higher return on equity and 7% higher premium CAGR than the bottom quartile, BCG found. 

5. The unique value of Unqork’s zero-code, full-platform solution

Given challenges insurers face, there is little doubt that the underwriting workbench is here to stay. If you are not in the evaluation phase, it is probably time. “In a world where adaptability reigns supreme, commercial line P&C insurers must embrace intelligent workbench solutions to not only survive, but to lead the charge in revolutionizing the insurance underwriting industry,” writes Davide Palanza, Research Manager, IDC Financial Insights.

In particular, some of the world’s biggest insurers are already using Unqork’s Underwriting Workbench solution to solve today’s urgent underwriting challenges, which streamlines and accelerates the entire underwriting process from intake to bind. In fact, Unqork’s solution was placed in the top quadrant of Celent’s latest report, Unlocking Underwriting Success, Global Edition: The Rise of Underwriting Workbenches, which highlights underwriting solutions with advanced decisioning tools and strong efficiency features.

Unqork unlocks innovation and drives new business by overcoming the most persistent challenges underwriters face, from siloed and consistent data to inflexible legacy systems and disconnected underwriting experiences. With Unqork’s Underwriting Workbench, you can launch sophisticated, customized products and streamline the underwriting process—from intake to binding—in just a few weeks and without writing a single line of code. 

Yes, without a single line of code and the technical debt that comes with it. This is possible because Unqork’s revolutionary data-driven architecture decouples application logic from the underlying code. But that doesn’t just mean building applications quickly. You can continually evolve them easily as technology changes, because the application itself remains modern, secure, and resilient. 

Finally, Unqork is a complete enterprise development platform. If and when you choose, you can go far beyond underwriting and leverage Unqork to solve complex, strategic industry use cases, from agent and customer portals to digital claims processing.

6. An underwriting success story

Hear from Tokio Marine’s John Zissu, VP of Technology, and Joel Cox, Lead Unqork Developer, on how the insurance leader has leveraged the Unqork platform to digitally transformed and rapidly iterate their core P&C underwriting processes, including:

• Unifying the underwriting experience with an e2e underwriter workbench app
• Creating a robust product manager and broker/customer portal
• Streamlining onboarding & maintenance, and scale back-office capabilities
• Enhancing app performance & client satisfaction with the Dynamic Refresh feature