The future of underwriting will be built on closer relationships between carriers and insurance agents, with carriers working hand-in-hand with agencies to maximize profits from books of business.
That was the word from Chad Combs, vice president of personal lines underwriting for Ohio Mutual Insurance Group. He was a keynote speaker at this year’s Insurance Innovators USA conference in Nashville.
“I believe underwriting today is fundamentally broken. I don’t think that the expertise that we have, the processes that we have, all that we’ve built is well-suited to solve the needs that we really have as an industry today,” said Combs.
In conversations with agents, it has become clear to him that carriers are not doing nearly enough to focus on an agency’s entire book, or on a geographic region, or on growth areas.
And carriers are often seen as simply reacting to consumers’ claims and agents’ requests. But to truly succeed in coming years with a younger crop of producers, carriers and their underwriters must become proactive influencers, nudging agents to develop the top accounts, sometimes with years of effort, said Combs, who has been with Ohio Mutual since 2014 and was previously head of standard auto underwriting with Nationwide Insurance.
In most cases, insurance carriers will need to be more than policy providers and a safety net for agents. That may mean becoming a wake-up call to agencies that are not cultivating the best clients and are not truly growing their books of business, Combs said.
“The underwriter of the future, the carrier of the future, is an expert at empowering agents. That’s what we have to be really good at,” he said.
That means consistent coaching of agents, using analytics and data to help mitigate catastrophic losses, building excellent client profiles, automating some tasks, and actually managing agencies’ entire books of business. The current model of rewarding agents mostly on new business should shift to include more and better renewals.
