“Underwriting precisely and consistently is never about an individual risk – it’s always about the portfolio.”
– Will Ross, CEO & Co-Founder, Federato
Federato recently earned a coveted spot on the Insurtech100 list of the world’s most innovative InsurTech companies that every leader in the insurance industry needs to know about in 2023.
The annual ranking compiled by specialist research firm FinTech Global is selected by a panel of industry experts and analysts. Now in its sixth year, the list celebrates the groundbreaking tech companies that are developing solutions to the insurance industry's most daunting challenges.
Will Ross, CEO and Co-founder of Federato and Megan Bock Zarnoch, the company’s COO sat down with the research team at FinTech Global to answer a few questions about Federato’s RiskOps underwriting and portfolio management platform and the major challenges Federato is solving for insurance carriers and MGAs.
“The insurance industry continues to confront emerging risks across four key categories – natural catastrophe, cybersecurity, social inflation and economic inflation,” Ross told FinTech Global. “The only option insurance organizations have to confront those risks is to solve the challenges of underwriting and portfolio optimization.”
Bock Zarnoch framed the core challenge facing insurers this way:
“The native environments in which underwriters are working has led to them spending 40-50% of their time hunting for information they need, and then rekeying or doing manual entry of the information relative to their prospect or renewal accounts. All of this detracts from the underwriters’ ability to do what they’re meant to do, which is analyze, understand, make decisions, and negotiate deals.”
Megan Bock Zarnoch, COO, Federato
Ross stressed the importance of the underwriting process and that insurers can no longer afford to underutilize data:
“Underwriting is the only role that affects both the top and bottom line. It was clear that there were external forces at play in insurance, and underwriting is obviously the key linchpin for profitability for any insurer. So, there is an opportunity to release pressure built up from all this investment in data by figuring out how to operationalize what data assets are available.”
Will Ross, CEO & Co-Founder, Federato
“Underwriters have been under-supported from a tech standpoint for a number of decades,” added Bock Zarnoch. “Nearly every single carrier or MGA is in the process of some form of system transformation, and when these transformations are underway it often creates a lot of noise and pain for the underwriter who is working directly with agents and brokers in that channel without delivering much in the way of benefits.”
“We line up a team for each customer that includes deep industry expertise so that an organization doesn’t have to tie up all of their own business resources to enable those deliveries – we do it for them. We also deliver in a quick way that is aligned with the customers’ own desires, so we’re delivering in periods of eight to twelve weeks instead of 18 months or more, which is an unprecedented time to value in our industry.”
Megan Bock Zarnoch, COO, Federato
Federato’s RiskOps platform aligns portfolio strategy with underwriting action, empowering underwriters with real-time insights and tools to make better risk section decisions and more effectively manage their book of business.
To learn more, check out the Insurtech100 profile and read the full interview with Will and Megan here.
