Underwriting under pressure
Underwriting has always been at the heart of specialty insurance. It is where strategy meets execution: deciding which risks to take, at what price, and with what limits. Yet many underwriting teams today find themselves constrained not by their expertise, but by their tools.
Spreadsheets, once a symbol of efficiency and flexibility, are now showing their age. What once enabled agility has become a barrier. According to recent surveys, up to 40% of underwriters’ time is lost to administrative work, leaving less room for judgment, analysis, and client engagement. In a market defined by volatility and rising expectations, that is time insurers cannot afford to waste.
The challenges of today’s underwriting environment
Credit and specialty insurers face mounting challenges:
- Data fragmentation. Information is spread across emails, files, and siloed systems, undermining accuracy and consistency. Consider an underwriter trying to assess a multinational client: piecing together risk data from a dozen emails, a shared drive, and two legacy systems - all before the analysis can even begin.
- Manual bottlenecks. Underwriters are forced to review routine cases, creating backlogs and delaying quotes.
- Compliance complexity. Cross-border regulation and reporting demands increase the operational burden.
- Rising speed expectations. Brokers and clients expect decisions in hours, not weeks.
- Scaling constraints. Legacy tools struggle to support new products, geographies, and fast-changing risk profiles.
These issues do not only affect efficiency. They also limit growth potential, slow responsiveness to clients, and erode competitiveness in a crowded market.
Why the next leap matters
The next underwriting leap is not about replacing underwriters with technology. It is about restoring the profession to its core purpose: making smart risk decisions that balance growth and resilience.
That means shifting from:
- Data entry to data insight, allowing underwriters to analyze patterns and portfolios rather than hunt for information.
- Manual approvals to guided judgment, using automation for repetitive cases while keeping human expertise at the center.
- Compliance burden to compliance by design, embedding audit trails and regulatory checks into daily workflows.
- Reactive to proactive, leveraging analytics and signals to anticipate risks before they materialize.
A “smart decision” framework makes this possible. In practice, that might mean integrated data feeds that give underwriters a single, consolidated view of exposures, automated risk scoring for routine cases, or embedded compliance workflows that reduce the need for manual oversight. These elements allow underwriters to focus on where their expertise truly adds value: nuanced risk judgment and client engagement.
Implications for credit insurance
Credit insurers in particular operate in an environment where speed, transparency, and precision are critical. Economic volatility, higher insolvency rates, and shifting supply chains create a constant demand for agility.
Remaining tied to spreadsheets results in longer issuance cycles, greater exposure to error, and limited ability to scale. By contrast, moving to smarter decision frameworks unlocks faster response times, consistency and auditability for regulatory compliance, and the capacity to expand into new markets or launch new products without reengineering processes.
The benefits of this leap are already visible in practice across the credit insurance and specialty markets. Insurers that have modernized underwriting processes report measurable gains:
- Policy issuance times cut dramatically. What once took more than two weeks can now be completed in less than an hour, significantly improving service levels for brokers and clients.
- Faster quotes with less manual effort. Submission-to-quote cycles have been reduced by a factor of three, with underwriters saving more than 15 hours per quote and over 30 hours per renewal.
- Capacity to grow profitably. Some insurers have doubled premium volumes within three years, thanks to systems that scale quickly to support new markets and product lines.
- Stronger portfolios. By integrating data sources and automating risk scoring, insurers have increased cover limits by more than 40 percent while maintaining prudent risk controls.
These are not theoretical gains. They show what is possible when underwriting moves from fragmented tools to a unified, intelligence-driven framework.
The competitive gap between those who make this leap and those who delay will widen rapidly in the years ahead.
Underwriting’s new era
The underwriting profession is entering a new era. The tools of the past, built on fragmented spreadsheets and manual workflows, are no longer enough.
The future lies in enabling underwriters to focus on judgment, relationships, and strategic risk management, supported by data-driven insights and streamlined processes. This requires embracing new approaches: centralized data platforms to unify information, AI-powered triage to prioritize cases, and low-code or no-code tools to allow insurers to adapt workflows without waiting for IT.
This is the next underwriting leap: moving from spreadsheets to smart decisions, and from administration to strategy. For credit insurers navigating volatile conditions, it is not just an opportunity, it is an imperative.
