The underwriting process has become increasingly complex and competitive for traditional insurance providers. Underwriting workflows are generally inefficient and costly. At the same time, everyone from agents to brokers to policyholders are expecting faster, more accurate, and more personalized pricing.
More data exists than ever before to inform the underwriting process. However, most underwriters lack the resources to manage the quality of data that comes from these sources, and the ability to effectively analyze the data to inform how they quote, evaluate risk, and service accounts. Furthermore, legacy technology and data silos create elongated data pipelines and data management challenges that make underwriters less efficient, drive up costs, delay insight, and allow room for error. In a 2021 Accenture survey of underwriters, 95% said the most important area for improving underwriting is improving the quality and accuracy of data around underwriting submissions, and one of their top concerns is the lack of technology investments in improving systems.
Snowflake enables a more efficient underwriting workflow by transforming an organization’s data and technology architecture. With Snowflake, insurance providers can normalize and store all of their data in a single globally available, strongly governed data platform and share data across different lines of business, teams, and data partners. This means that underwriters can quickly access, ingest, and leverage first-party or third-party data more seamlessly. And they can transform data within the platform itself rather than extracting it to transform it off-platform, thereby reducing latency and time to insight. In addition, as underwriting teams look to adopt machine learning (ML) and robotics process automation (RPA) capabilities to drive further efficiencies, Snowflake’s scalability and performance mean that teams can develop advanced AI and ML models that leverage more data.
Here’s how a few of our financial services customers are using Snowflake to streamline and optimize the underwriting process.
CapSpecialty
CapSpecialty helps small and mid-sized businesses manage risk. To support underwriting and enable data-driven decision-making, CapSpecialty partnered with Snowflake to streamline how it ingests and analyzes large amounts of premium, policy, and customer data. Prior to Snowflake, CapSpecialty’s underwriting team spent time and resources performing manual tasks and managing data in spreadsheets, which created operational inefficiencies. Re-architecting on Snowflake provided a single source of truth that could then power CapSpecialty’s data analytics and underwriting workflows. Connecting to Power BI minimized data wrangling and democratized data analytics. Insurance premium visualizations delivered fresh insights to users within six minutes of the data becoming available—a 20x improvement over its legacy environment.
Allianz Benelux
Insurance leader Allianz Benelux uses the Snowflake Data Cloud to break down data silos. The result is smarter decision-making from improved data sharing across internal teams and with key suppliers and customers. Insurance has always been data-driven, and Allianz Benelux relies on a combination of data, statistics, and math to understand the levels of risk it covers and how much money it will need to pay out when risks become a reality. The more data the company has, the better it can estimate risks and the more accurately it can determine reserves. Ultimately, data analytics also determines the price of the premiums the company needs to charge for services. Allianz Benelux’s customers are mainly insurance brokers. Knowing exactly how those brokers navigate through all of the underwriting steps is vital to seeing how they use data to put together the best solutions and pricing packages for their customers. It’s very beneficial for brokers to have immediate access to reliable data.
Discover how your organization can use Snowflake to drive efficient underwriting:
- Learn more about the Snowflake Financial Services Data Cloud.
- Read our Financial Services Success Guide: 8 Ways Financial Services Organizations Deliver Innovation and Security with the Data Cloud.
- Read our blog post: How to Deliver a Customer-Centric Banking and Insurance Experience with Data.
- Read our industry brief: Snowflake’s Financial Services Data Cloud.