Replacing a manual review with evidence-derived acceptance gates
A profitable line was being suppressed by a process everyone believed was prudence.
Context
Writing low-income housing as a commercial insurance property required a lengthy evaluation by an underwriter and then a senior underwriter — of the building, the client base, and a range of decisions that were made from consistent inputs but varied with the individual doing the review.
The stated objection
Underwriting resisted automating acceptance, holding that these risks required professional, case-by-case judgement.
Intervention
We automated the approval decision by deriving acceptance gates for each individual building feature — using information the front-line agent already collects at the point of sale.
How it was proven
We tested the underwriters' own stated requirement empirically: the additional information they asked for had no impact on claims payouts, measured against the existing claims categories.
Outcome
- The entire lag time associated with the manual review was removed.
- The category was proven profitable — the sentiment attached to low income was not a risk signal.
- Underwriting capacity was released, and category profitability improved, because the manual decisions had been negatively impacting profitability in that category.
The underwriters pushed back heavily through their management layer.
Overcome on evidence, not escalation: the analysis, and the projected benefit to the underwriting team's own capacity and profitability metrics, were indisputable.
Why it matters
Resistance was defended as professional judgement, not job protection — so the claim was testable, and it was falsified. The data showed the manual process itself was the problem: lag was suppressing a profitable line while the organisation believed it was exercising caution.
Client and product line anonymised. Figures are as reported by the operator.
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