Tropical Storm Gabrielle formed Wednesday in the Atlantic Ocean but was far from land, forecasters said.
The center of Gabrielle re-formed from its morning position and was located about 990 miles (1,600 kilom
eters) east of the Northern Leeward Islands, the U.S. National Hurricane Center in Miami said. The tropical storm had m
aximum sustained winds of 50 mph (80 kph) and was moving to the northwest at 14 mph (22 kph), forecasters said.
The weather service predicted little change in strength over the next couple of days but said the storm could intensify over the weekend.
There were no watches or warnings in effect, and no hazards affecting land. Gabrielle was expected to remain over open waters for the next several days.
This year’s Atlantic hurricane season has been relatively quiet, with no named storms for about three weeks and o
nly one named hurricane. Experts say there’s a few reasons for that, but it doesn’t mean dangerous systems won’t form later.
For example, information for a new business submission might be captured and then turned into a PDF. “And where does that PDF go? Well, it gets emailed to
10, 12, 15 different insurers so they can evaluate the risk,” Blackwell s
aid. “And what do they do? They take that information, key it all in
manually. They plug into their underwriting workbench so they can decide if they want the risk,” he explained. Th
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at process takes a lot of time, he said. In addition, “we have found that 30%, 40%, 50% of the time in that process the carrier never returns a quote … it’s too much wor
k. It’s too much cost, and they simply don’t get back to the agency. They don’t get back to the insured,” he said. “What a terrible experience for everybody,” Blackwell s
aid. “The carrier is not actually underwriting the risk that they want. The insured doesn’t know the status of their [insurance] quote and the agency is just chasing people down.”
Richard Hartley, co-founder and CEO of Cytora, told Insurance J
ith Cytora’s ability to improve the process and control over risk selection, is a game changer. There is a huge opport
unity in the commercial insurance industry to improve the workflow process from submission to binding, he said. AI can help.
“The insurance industry is really inefficient in how brokers send risks to
insurers,” he said. “If you are writing commercial insurance, 40% of your time today is absorbed by reading and interpreting submission data.
“These are highly skilled underwriters who really should be making decisions on risks. But what they are actually doing is spending 40% to 50% of their time just manually reading and interpreting in a very monotonous way.”