European reinsurer grows business, not headcount

How Moody’s delivered significant performance gains with key workflow enhancements and API integrations

Key takeaways

• Over 30% efficiency gains
• Gains achieved without increasing headcount
• Decrease in average time spent on submissions
• Increase in number of submissions quoted
• More time spent on higher-value tasks, such as complex submissions
• Greater confidence in taking bigger line sizes to grow overall business and increase profitability
   

The challenge — expanding business without increasing headcount

A European reinsurer had been growing its premium base at around 10% per year and was growing its business but without increasing headcount. It planned to improve efficiency in its risk modeling workflows with the goal of increasing the proportion of submissions reviewed while simultaneously freeing up specialists to perform more detailed analyses of larger submissions to its book of business. Though this represented a significant challenge for the company, it knew that Moody’s would be well-positioned to help the organization meet its goals.
 

The solution — creating a fully optimized underwriting workflow with Moody’s APIs

Our Consulting Services team first conducted a workflow assessment to identify inefficiencies. A thorough analysis of the company’s processes was carried out, which included reviewing the steps in its current workflows for broker-provided results and where the reinsurer performs the modeling. This also included examining existing infrastructure and software, and estimating the time spent on each of the steps in the organization’s catastrophe modeling process.

The assessment revealed significant time spent on low-value or non-value-adding tasks, such as data collection and transfer between different interfaces. Another key factor was the amount of time employees spent interacting with many different systems, especially when validating results provided by brokers. Our consultants implemented an optimized workflow by developing an Excel add-in to align with the client’s existing tools, as well as Moody’s RMS APIs. The APIs were used to automatically perform specific modeling activities and integrate our analytics directly into the reinsurer’s downstream tools, embed the reinsurer’s own custom queries, and centralize interactions in the client’s existing workflows, removing the need to switch between different systems.
 

The outcome — major efficiency gain boosting business potential

By creating an Excel add-in and integrating Moody’s insurance APIs, the team streamlined the customer’s catastrophe modeling workflow, allowing them to import data from different sources and export analyses as required. This helped deliver efficiency gains of over 30%, dramatically reducing the reinsurer’s "time to quote." In one instance, a data transfer process that previously took the organization 20 minutes was reduced to mere seconds.

With these dramatic increases in efficiency, the company was able to analyze more submissions with the same headcount. The solution also reduced the average time spent on standard submissions, leading to higher throughput while also reducing the error rate. As a result, the catastrophe modeling team was able to provide more advanced analyses on complex submission and greater insights to its underwriters. Not only did this help the company deliver better pricing on business being quoted for its customers, but the additional time it had for complex submissions gave it the confidence to take on larger line sizes and maintain its rate of growth. It also meant experienced staff were freed up to apply their time to other high-value tasks to optimize their portfolio risk profile and capacity. The new workflow also helped new hires quickly get up to speed on unfamiliar systems and workflows.

The Moody’s insurance Consulting Services team provided a level of experience that helped the reinsurer not only deliver an effective solution on time but achieve gains beyond its original expectations. The company’s appreciation of the high availability of the consulting team and its positive attitude toward providing a solution has persuaded the company to develop an even closer strategic partnership with Moody’s in the future by building on the initial automation project.