Underwriting Automation Software for a Global Aviation Insurer with $30B in Assets

About Our Client

The Client is a global insurance carrier offering a rich variety of general and industry-specific commercial insurance types. Today, the company is one of the world’s fastest growing insurance organizations with over $30B in assets and underwriting capacities in 120+ countries on 6 continents.

Legacy Underwriting Software Failed to Meet the Evolving Needs

The Client decided to replace its 20-year-old underwriting solution for aviation insurance. The solution was used by the Client’s underwriters, policy administrators, and external brokers located worldwide. At a certain point, the system became no longer viable for handling the increasingly complex underwriting workflows and couldn’t deliver a smooth user experience. Plus, the legacy solution failed to provide a centralized view and full traceability of the risk rating, insurance pricing, and policy servicing activities. Such process opaqueness posed the risk of underwriting fraud and non-compliance, which could result in substantial revenue losses and severe legal penalties.

The Client wanted to build a new underwriting system to introduce robust process automation, establish a cohesive environment for cross-departmental collaboration, and ensure transparency of underwriting workflows. Due to the lack of in-house project management, business analysis, and relevant IT competencies, the Client was looking for a reliable tech partner to outsource the solution design and development. Owing to ScienceSoft’s 30+ years of experience in software development and decade-long expertise in insurance IT, the Client relied on our team to cover the end-to-end implementation of its underwriting system.

An Automated Collaborative Underwriting System

ScienceSoft’s experts started with business analysis and requirements engineering for the underwriting system. As a result, they introduced a clear concept of the solution, which comprised a detailed feature set, an optimal architecture design, a plan of necessary integrations and data flows, and UX and UI mockups. It laid the foundation for accurate project planning and helped prioritize software features for implementation.

ScienceSoft provided the Client with a dedicated team: a project manager, a business analyst, a software architect, 1 front-end, 1 full-stack, and 3 back-end developers, and 2 QA specialists. The team handled the entire software development process, from coding to quality assurance to data migration from the previously used tool. ScienceSoft’s tech experts also established integrations between the new solution and the Client’s back-office systems: Salesforce CRM, financial software, a compliance auditing system, and a BI tool. It helped automate and speed up insurance data sharing between the internal teams and make underwriting data available for company-wide business analytics.

With the aviation insurance underwriting solution delivered by ScienceSoft, the Client received the following powerful functionality:

Data intake

• Real-time aggregation of insurance applications from the CRM.

Underwriter task management

• Configurable dashboards providing the overview of underwriter qualifications, availability, location, etc. to streamline task assignment to the best-fitting professionals.
• A centralized dashboard to monitor the underwriters’ performance.

Risk assessment and insurance pricing

• Automated calculation of customer risk scores based on user-defined parameters: a customer’s financial sustainability, location, loss history, etc.
• On-demand modification of actuarial models.
• User-defined rules to automatically calculate optimal premium amounts based on a customer’s risk score, a requested coverage amount, and a region-specific tax rate.
• Automated quote generation and submission to customers, brokers, and insurance agents.
• Rule-based recalculation of due premium amounts when customer risk scores are updated.
• Instant transfer of underwriting data to the Client’s enterprise-wide data warehouse for analysis and reporting.

Policy management

• Customizable policy templates for various insurance types: airline insurance, airport insurance, equipment insurance, cargo insurance, etc.
• Automatically applying customer-specific coverage terms, premium amounts, taxes, and payment plans to the policies.
• Collaborative policy creation and editing.
• Rule-based policy updating and renewal.
• Centralized storage of all aviation insurance policies.
• Tracking the history of policy-associated activities: creation, editing, sharing, etc.

Underwriting control

• Drill-down dashboards that provide a centralized view of all underwriting transactions and events.
• End-to-end traceability of the risk assessment and insurance pricing logic and operations.
• Real-time monitoring of the quote generation and policy issuance statuses.
• Tracking the received and due premium payments.

Broker functionality

• Managing and updating personal and business information of brokers and customers.
• Template-based generation of aviation insurance quotes.
• Instant quote submission to prospects.
• Overview of insurance applications, quotes, and issued policies.

Security and compliance

• Multi-factor authentication.
• Configurable permissions to view, edit, and share specific insurance data for various user roles: underwriters, policy administrators, supervisors, brokers, etc.
• A comprehensive audit log of user activities.
• Automated detection of fraudulent insurance transactions with notifications to experts when a manual review is needed.
• Geography-based KYC/AML and OFAC verification for new customers and brokers.

After the underwriting system was implemented, the Client received comprehensive user training materials and detailed technical documentation for the solution.

Improved Underwriting Efficiency and Lower Costs

The Client obtained a powerful, user-friendly solution that enables robust automation and full visibility of underwriting workflows. Collaborating closely with the project stakeholders on the Client’s side, ScienceSoft’s team provided proactive problem-solving throughout the project and launched the software with minimal disruption to the Client’s business processes. The new solution helped improve employee productivity and minimize the risk of underwriting fraud and non-compliance. Due to the solution’s modern tech stack, the Client got the opportunity to reduce software maintenance costs.

The delivered underwriting system became the Client’s core business platform that centralizes all available aviation insurance data and provides complete insight into company-wide underwriting operations. The success in automated aviation insurance inspired the Client to kick off all-around digital transformation of its business. The Client appreciated ScienceSoft’s approach to development and expressed interest in further cooperation to build similar solutions for its subsidiary.

Techs and Tools

.NET, Angular, Microsoft SQL Server, IDE Visual Studio, Microsoft SQL Studio, Azure DevOps Server, Confluence, Jira.