Global Underwriter Case Study

The Client Problem

A global insurance underwriter was looking to address the challenge presented by the complex relationship ecosystem and communication siloes which exist between brokers, clients and themselves. Both the distribution teams and the underwriters wanted to fully visualise the flow of information between the firm and all its external stakeholders, brokers and clients, and understand who held the key relationships and how those relationships were evolving over the underwriting lifecycle in order to drive the firm’s profitability and maximise efficiency.

Each underwriter and distribution team member had their own system of maintaining their portfolio of broker and client relationships and doing business development. They operated in a very siloed manner and had little visibility of who their colleagues were talking to and about what. Compounding this complex broker and client relationship matrix was the fact that none of the underwriters used the CRM for anything other than pipeline management, so it was hard to see at an individual level where relationships lay and what was going on across external contacts and companies. Therefore, the data upon which the firm was basing strategic business development, forecasting and growth decisions, was incomplete. Distribution teams, liaising with brokers and their underwriting colleagues, also wanted a clearer picture, outside of trading volumes, of where things were going well and badly.

As relationships have shifted from in-person to digital, each underwriter had a growing number of digital touch-points per relationship.

Senior management wanted to gain visibility of underwriter activity and which client/broker relationships were being under or over serviced. Distribution teams wanted this underwriter insight too, not only to feedback to underwriters internally but also to share with market management teams at brokers. This is so that they could identify any challenges at an early stage, by being able to predict and understand issues prior to things like renewals. They also wanted to look at internal (and external) retail and wholesale broker relationships, understand which lines were being discussed with whom, when and where, as well as better understand the quality of the underwriters’ relationships with clients.

Relata’s solution

By analysing millions of data points gathered directly from the firm’s internal and external email flow, Synapse captures all the client and broker relationships, analysing contacts, companies, content and colleagues and surfacing relationship quality insights to maximise revenue opportunities and minimise renewal issues.

Synapse provides real-time analysis of which underwriters within the firm are speaking to which clients and brokers, and surfaces how it is going. This instantly and automatically removes the communication siloes that otherwise can cause brokers and clients to be left unattended, and premiums to be jeopardised.

Previous communication siloes between the underwriter, broker and client are broken down thanks to Synapse’s ability to provide relationship maps across the firm and its stakeholders and clients. Underwriters can understand who within their firm holds the key relationships with clients and brokers to ensure that good relationships leads to the best and most appropriate inbound risk from brokers and where direct client relationships exist, to ensure renewals.

Overall, Relata can:

• Identify and alert underwriters when a colleague has got a strong relationship with a stakeholder/firm they are speaking to/about to speak to, and enable them to leverage the key relationship holders across the firm.
• Help underwriters stay front of mind and in touch with their own network with intelligent relationship nudges
• Reveal how an underwriter’s relationships are strengthening or weakening over time so they can maximise opportunities and minimise retention issues.
• Provide management with early warning signals about under- or over-serviced clients so that they can manage all relationships more consistently and profitably.
• Highlight which topics are generating the most interest to ensure client communication is always relevant and well timed according to their specific preferences.
• Unearth previous employees’ relationships by sucking in up to two years’ of historical interaction data to help corporatise broking relationships.
• Remove the reliance on manual CRM data inputs and automatically capture all client, broking and underwriting interactions in real-time with no manual data entry required.
• Support distribution teams in ensuring growth and sharing hitherto hidden, objective, insights with brokers.

How do we get there?

Relata integrates with our clients to deliver a bespoke and customised hosting solution. Relata’s modular system architecture provides flexibility to fulfil the client’s legal, regulatory, security and data privacy requirements.The client can opt for a cloud-based hosting for which the majority of the components are run in an isolated client cloud account that is fully managed by Relata.

Requiring minimal knowledge, training and effort from the client, this solution allows for a faster go-live time frame and results in the system being up and running in the client’s environment within 2 weeks. Relata releases regular maintenance updates and takes full ownership of the running, maintenance and upgrades delivered to the on-cloud components. And if you have dashboard fatigue we can deliver our insights via reports, delivered as often as you like.

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