Power Up Your Product Development With Repeatable Processes

Agility and speed-to-market capabilities remain critical for an insurer looking to grow their business. In the highly saturated P&C market developing and launching new products quicker than the competition is vital.

Easier said than done! According to a Deloitte study, it usually takes 12 to 18 months to roll out a new insurance product. Even modifying existing coverage requires three to six months.

The mandate for speed is hampered by outdated legacy applications and operational silos. Often overlooked is an insurer’s inability to create replicable processes to build efficiency. To put it plainly, launching a new product means doing many things that the insurer has done before. With a structured methodology for product launch, insurers can use these repeatable tasks as a basis for customization rather than the inevitable mountain of repetitive busywork.

Speed to market doesn’t just mean faster product launch, of course. It also means updating products quickly and pushing them out across multiple distribution networks. Internal inefficiencies create friction, resulting in product rollout that is both time- and labor-intensive.

To address the twin challenges of accelerating the launch of new products as well as the maintenance of existing products, P&C insurers are levelling up their agility with substantial investments in product development solutions at scale. A modern product development solution must provide a structured methodology to launch products fast and make products available as a service.

Creating a shared blueprint using a product development solutions helps insurers expedite the repetitive launch processes for multiple products and geographies in product development, maintenance, and rollout. That blueprint includes integrating with administrative systems and portals, preparing the necessary materials for risk assessment and underwriting, and all customer-facing capabilities.

This is the first post in our new blog series on the possibilities and challenges of product development in P&C insurance. We’re sharing our expertise on creating and maintaining insurance products to give you new ideas to enhance the ease of doing business. We’ll look at lessons learned from our clients, specific case studies, thought leadership, and technology trends that affect your product development processes.

We’ll be posting more content on thought-provoking technology topics that affect the industry in the following weeks. Our next topic is the top pain points in product development.

To learn more about the power of repeatable processes in product launch, check out our case study library to learn how we helped Players Health achieved an impressive 90-day launch for their new GL product for sports organizations as well as other success stories from our clients.

At OwlSurance, we have years of experience working with our insurer and MGA clients to streamline their business processes. We help our customers prioritize ease of doing business and provide the technology and insurance know-how to help them get there.

1 Product development data from Deloitte.

About OwlSurance

At OwlSurance, a cloud business unit of ValueMomentum, Inc., we offer a unified data platform because we believe in the power of unified data to transform how people do business. Let us help accelerate your data journey with the right technology and the expertise you need to put it to work for you. For more information, visit us at www.owlsurance.com.

Streamlining Submissions Means Less Busywork

An agent can spend 20 minutes to over an hour filling out an insurance application, depending on the line of business and risk complexity – and that’s just for a renewal. What each insurer requires in terms of forms, data, and process also varies. Agents typically work with an average of five carriers. Multiply all of that paperwork and processing per submission per insurer, and it becomes clear how much time an agent must dedicate to busywork.

Within the insurer’s organization, the submission lifecycle can lengthen even more through siloed, high-touch processes without a coordinated approach to customer acquisition. Meanwhile, the new prospect or renewing policyholder is waiting for indicative pricing to decide which insurer and agent can best serve them.

Submissions are critical to ease of doing business, market share, and agent and customer satisfaction. Agents and insurers alike lose out with inefficient submission processes and risk losing or disappointing customers who have to wait.

Fortunately, this is a solvable problem. Efficiency gains in the submission process benefit everyone involved. An insurer who can streamline the submission-to-quote journey attracts and retains more agents and customers. At the same time, agents spend less time checking boxes and rekeying data in favor of serving their customers. Time spent in front of a computer screen is time they can’t spend more productively, dealing with the people they represent.

By leveraging and pre-filling 3rd-party data from external sources, insurers empower agents to create quotes fast. Information is more accurate, more current, and less likely to contain entry errors. By fulfilling all submission guidelines at once, insurers can minimize back and forth with the agent, resulting in quicker quote response times.

They also reduce errors in their submissions and increase compliance by automating the quote review process. When the quality of submissions increases, quoting processes become faster with a higher overall rate of closure.

This blog post is the second in a series on streamlining your quoting processes with an emphasis on getting the most bang for your buck. Our next topic is the top pain points in the Qualification stage of the quoting process.

We’re sharing our expertise on the quoting lifecycle to give you new ideas to enhance the ease of doing business. We’ll look at lessons learned from our clients, specific case studies, thought leadership, and technology trends that affect your submission and quoting processes.

To learn more in the meantime, you can look through our case study library for quoting success stories, like the 85% reduction in quoting time achieved by our client Appalachian Underwriters. We also helped a regional carrier shift more than 60% of their BOP business to straight-through processing.

At OwlSurance, we have years of experience working with our insurer and MGA clients to simplify their submissions and streamline their business processes. We help our customers prioritize ease of doing business and provide the technology and insurance know-how to help them get there.

1 Renewal timeframe statistics from Insurance Business America.

About OwlSurance

At OwlSurance, a cloud business unit of ValueMomentum, Inc., we offer a unified data platform because we believe in the power of unified data to transform how people do business. Let us help accelerate your data journey with the right technology and the expertise you need to put it to work for you. For more information, visit us at www.owlsurance.com.

Digital Transformation in Lean Times: A New Blog Series from OwlSurance

“Digital transformation” has been a key mandate for the P&C insurance industry for over 25 years, but Verisk and APCIA just released industry data that puts a different spin on it. The news isn’t great – so it’s more important than ever to prioritize high-impact digital initiatives that won’t hurt your bottom line.
2022 wasn’t a good year for the P&C insurance industry, according to newly released financial results from Verisk and American Property Casualty Insurance Association (APCIA) reported a variety of data points that show losses increasing at a startling rate while income is falling.
  • Overall underwriting loss is the highest it’s been since 2011, at a staggering $26.9B. That’s more than a sixfold increase over losses in 2021.
  • At the same time, net income decreased by more than a third. Other key indicators including surplus, combined ratio, incurred costs and loss adjustment expenses are also worrying in light of increasing natural disaster exposure and inflation.

As lousy as these results are, there’s still good news for insurers. Digital transformation is a way of investing in efficiency, cost reductions, and staff satisfaction as well as staying up to date with technological advances.

A tight financial situation forces companies to focus their spending on the most important projects. It’s easy to forget that digital transformation can be tackled in smaller, more manageable chunks rather than as a single juggernaut initiative.

In fact, that’s the smartest way to do it! You can still impress your customers and prospects and further your digital savvy – without breaking the bank.
In our new blog series, we’ll lay out actionable recommendations for low-cost, high-impact ways to better leverage your existing technology.

Upcoming topics include:

  • SEO for non-experts
  • Leveraging industry influencers
  • Collaborative customer acquisition

We’ll also discuss easy technological improvements to increase automation, including straight-through processing, and speeding product launch and maintenance with repeatable processes.

The bottom line is that possibilities abound to leverage technology without hurting your bottom line.

1 See Reinsurance News for more details on the new industry data from Verisk and APCIA reported March 30, 2023.

About OwlSurance

At OwlSurance, a cloud business unit of ValueMomentum, Inc., we offer a unified data platform because we believe in the power of unified data to transform how people do business. Let us help accelerate your data journey with the right technology and the expertise you need to put it to work for you. For more information, visit us at www.owlsurance.com.