Automating Manual Underwriting Decisioning

Business requirement

• Underwriting relied on a generic telephonic questionnaire that asked every applicant the same fixed set of questions, regardless of their actual risk profile.
• Every response had to be manually reviewed and interpreted by an underwriter before a policy could move forward.
• Applicant and company details were self-reported with no independent verification, so inaccurate or false information was often not caught until much later in the process.

Our solution

We built an automated decisioning workflow that evaluates applicant data against defined risk rules and routes the case accordingly.

• A rules engine evaluates applicant data against defined risk rules so decisions are consistent rather than driven by a generic questionnaire.
• Straightforward cases are auto-approved; only genuinely complex cases are forwarded to a human underwriter, with the relevant context already attached.
• Applicant and company details are automatically validated against third-party data sources at the point of quoting, catching false or inaccurate information before it can move further into the pipeline.

Business outcomes

• 60–70% of applications are now resolved automatically without underwriter review.
• Third-party validation of parties and companies eliminated cases of false information being carried through the quoting process.
• Underwriters now spend their time only on cases that genuinely need expert judgment.

Part of a 5+ year ongoing engineering partnership with this client. References available on request.

Part of the same partnership

• Modernizing Life and Group Insurance Operations
• From 5–6 Days to Near-Instant Policy Activation

Tools & technologies

Architecture

Microservices

Messaging

SQL Server Service Broker (event-driven decisioning)

Validation

Third-party identity & company verification API

• Microservices
• SQL Server Service Broker
• Third-party APIs