This article is by Paul Templar, CEO, VIPR Solutions
The London market’s delegated authority underwriting space is ripe for disruption, and artificial intelligence offers a pragmatic solution to achieving this goal.
To put it bluntly, delegated authority underwriting still runs on a fundamentally defective process. The longstanding mutual handoff between intermediary and risk carrier begins when brokers send placement messages with bordereaux attached. While front-end systems in the delegated authority space present a top-level view of the risk, from this point onwards, bordereaux data drops out of the digital workflow and has to be manually reloaded into downstream systems.
The reason why carriers, MGAs and reinsurers tolerate this unsatisfactory situation is because no single provider has closed the gap.
What these clients are typically looking for is easier access to risk, premium and claims data, to help them improve pricing, reserving, monitoring and reporting on their book of business. Until now, the only solution has been a manual workaround.
We believe all that is about to change.
The real value of AI The recent announcement of VIPR and WCL’s collaboration on the market’s first end-to-end workflow for non-bureau delegated authority underwriting closes that longstanding gap by connecting WCL’s broker submission process with VIPR’s AI-enabled validation, reconciliation and reporting. The end result is cleaner, decision-ready data earlier in the underwriting process.
While there has been a great deal of hype surrounding AI and insurance in the past few years, with the reality of AI transformation often lagging behind expectations, in the delegated authority space AI is already demonstrably helping operations.
There are measurable gains in practical use cases such as data validation, exception handling, bordereaux ingestion, reconciliation, audit trails, reporting and portfolio visibility.
Much of the hype around transformation has focused on whether AI is likely to replace human underwriters – and can be relied on to make judgements on their behalf. However, we believe that the realistic scenario – and the real value in deploying AI in the delegated authority space – is in giving underwriters, operations teams and capacity providers better data, at greater speed.
The next phase of AI enhancement As I explored in a recent whitepaper on artificial intelligence in the US program market, the pace of change is accelerating, not slowing.
The initial implementation of AI a few years ago resulted in a kind of glorified OCR that enabled the extraction of data from unstructured documents.
One year on, insurance carriers began showing real results in using AI for workflow automation – for routing claims, pre-populating submissions and flagging anomalies.
Last year, we saw AI being used to support underwriting decisions, with reasoning models being deployed to analyse risk scenarios, identify portfolio concentrations and recommend pricing adjustments.
This year has seen AI in insurance move into a new phase, with AI managing entire workflows from end-to-end, while humans provide oversight at key decision points.
Over the next 12–24 months, we can expect AI’s impact on the London market delegated authority business to be less glamorous than some might expect, but far more useful.
AI-enabled validation will surface data quality issues at the point of capture, reducing friction, improving data confidence and accelerating onboarding – giving (re)insurance carriers a single, defensible data trail which will improve reporting, oversight and portfolio visibility.
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