Markel, a leading specialty insurer, and insurtech Cytora have announced that their recent partnership has resulted in an 113% increase in productivity (GWP per FTE) for Markel’s underwriting team.
Cytora has been working with Markel since 2021 to transform its underwriting process into digital workflows by leveraging AI to automate pre-underwriting activities, perform upfront evaluation of risks, and eliminate rekeying of data. This enables the link between growth and expense base to begin to be decoupled, allowing Markel’s specialist underwriters to focus on decision-ready risks with a high propensity to quote and bind.
As well as increasing productivity, the partnership has led to a reduction in quote turnaround times for Markel’s strategic partners from an average of one day to just two hours.
Markel’s partnership with Cytora underscores how digital transformation and clever use of AI can substantially increase efficiency by automating routine tasks. Prior to working with Cytora, Markel estimated that its underwriters spent 30% of their time on low skill and value tasks. Senior underwriters had to assess every incoming submission and route them to the appropriate underwriter. This prevented these skilled team members from dedicating more time to more complex risks or managing broker relationships.
TRIAGE SYSTEM
Through its work with Cytora, Markel’s underwriters no longer spend time on low value activities with risks digitized upfront and augmented with additional data sources, bringing together all data required for evaluation. They are then triaged and routed to the right specialist underwriter. As a result, expert underwriters receive decision-ready risks within minutes.
Neil Galjaard, Managing Director of Markel, said: “We are committed to giving brokers and clients enhanced service levels and Cytora has been a foundational partner helping us to effectively grow our scale and enable our underwriters to provide enhanced service to customers and brokers. We are now deepening our partnership with Cytora to build on the success we have achieved to date and are excited about creating further value for our brokers and clients in this next phase.”
Richard Hartley, CEO and Co-founder of Cytora, said: “Markel is a leading example of an insurer embracing the latest technology to revolutionise its business. We know that AI-driven Digital Risk Processing has the capacity to transform organisations by vastly improving efficiency and freeing employees up to do much higher value work. Our partnership with Markel is a clear example of this in action – the productivity increases are significant. It underscores what can be achieved when insurers invest in digitising their underwriting workflows.”
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