Submission Triage: Solving the Bottleneck in Insurance

Introduction

For most insurers, submission intake is a significant bottleneck in their workflows. Before insurers can make meaningful progress on productivity and profitability goals, they must first address inherently inefficient intake processes that waste underwriter time, miss good opportunities, and slow down time-to-quote.

First-In, First-Out: Slow and Inefficient

Traditionally, underwriters process submissions in the order they arrive, examining each deal to determine if it’s worth pursuing.This first-in, first-out (FIFO) approach is inherently inefficient and often leads to missed opportunities, wasted time, and lost revenue. 

Even the most efficient underwriter can only work so quickly, and the speed of submission intake limits the overall pace at which the organization can evaluate and quote deals. For specialty insurance - where policies are often complex and nuanced - this problem is especially acute. Underwriters can’t keep up with the volume of incoming submissions, and the best deals can get buried under a mountain of less relevant opportunities. Worse, underwriters are spending valuable time reviewing submissions that are unlikely to close, while high-appetite, high-winnability risks languish in the queue.

For underwriting organizations, there’s no path to meaningfully improve underwriting efficiency without first solving the intake bottleneck - and which means moving away from FIFO.

How Does Submission Triage Solve the Intake Bottleneck?

Federato’s Submission Triage leverages agentic AI to systematically tackle the intake bottleneck. Instead of adhering to the FIFO model, Submission Triage assesses every incoming submission in real time against an insurer’s appetite and portfolio strategy.

Here’s how it works:

• When a submission arrives, Submission Triage determines if it should be automatically declined, followed up for more information, or prioritized for intake.
• Submissions with the highest scores for winnability and appetite are surfaced first for underwriters’ immediate attention.
• Submissions that are clearly not a fit for the organization’s appetite are recommended for decline, minimizing the time underwriters spend on low-potential deals.

Early adopters of Submission Triage have seen remarkable improvements, including an 89% reduction in time to quote and a 3.7x increase in high-appetite business bound. Underwriters can focus on evaluating prime opportunities rather than wading through noise.

How is Submission Triage Different from Traditional Intake Solutions

While there have been previous attempts to solve the submission intake problem, traditional solutions have not been able to provide underwriters with significant results. Some were built without a deep understanding of underwriting. Others were not actually technology at all and simply routed the work to offshore teams - shifting the bottleneck, rather than solving it.

Federato’s Submission Triage works because it leverages agentic AI to reason through submissions, the same way an underwriter would. In our user research, we learned that when evaluating a submission, underwriters don’t look at individual documents in isolation. Instead, they look at the whole context of the submission, across all documentation, to determine if the submission is a good opportunity. 

Submission Triage uses LLM-based reasoning to examine the entire context of a submission, and model how an actual underwriter would work. It takes into account factors like overall portfolio composition and how winnable a particular submission is when recommending a risk, and continually learns from human underwriters’ decisions to improve its selections.

This allows for a dynamic triage solution that is always evolving its reasoning to keep up with changing conditions. When appetite changes, Submission Triage’s selections do too.

Conclusion

Submission intake has long been a bottleneck that stifles growth and profitability in specialty insurance. With Federato’s Submission Triage, insurers can eliminate inefficient FIFO processes, get high-value deals in front of underwriters sooner, and accelerate the quote process. Early adopters are already experiencing transformative results—now, it’s time for the rest of the industry to catch up.

Learn more about how Federato’s AI-powered Submission Triage can accelerate your submission intake process. Request a demo today.

FAQs

1. What is submission triage?

Submission triage is the process of evaluating and prioritizing incoming insurance submissions based on factors such as appetite alignment, winnability, and business strategy.

2. How does Federato’s Submission Triage differ from traditional intake solutions?

Federato’s Submission Triage uses agentic AI to evaluate entire submissions in context, and reason to a decision similarly to how underwriters work.

3. Can Submission Triage help with specialty insurance submissions?

Yes, Submission Triage is designed to handle complex underwriting processes like those for specialty insurance.

4. How does Submission Triage impact underwriting efficiency?

By automating the initial evaluation of submissions, Submission Triage reduces time to quote by up to 89% and surfaces high-winnability deals first.

5. What kind of results have insurers seen using Federato’s Submission Triage?

Early adopters have seen up to 2.8x more high-appetite submissions quoted and 3.7x more high-appetite business bound.