At the end of the day, the commercial insurance business has always been highly reliant on subjective human judgment. That’s the whole job of underwriters: to assess the level of risk and determine the necessary premium that takes the risks into consideration.
Joyn was founded with a bold idea: through innovation, data, and technology, we can improve the underwriting process and streamline the insurance experience. Using technology and advanced analytics, we can get better results for our brokers and their customers.
Underwriters’ decision-making processes can be subjective and biased by their own experiences. And while the best underwriters get it right most of the time, this subjectivity can lead to accounts getting written when they shouldn’t be (or premiums being too high or too low), or to missed opportunities where accounts that should be written are mistakenly rejected.
On the flip side, a very similar argument can be made against letting a machine do all the underwriting in commercial insurance. Because of lower data volumes than in personal lines, algorithms inadvertently tend to have their own biases: they are only as good as the underlying data, and any kind of bias present in the data will make its way into the algorithmic output. While there are ways to correct for some of these pitfalls through advanced statistical methods, cautionary tales abound where fully automated underwriting opened up the floodgates for adverse selection and crashing books of business in the process.
At Joyn, we try to have our cake and eat it too by harnessing the best of both worlds through machine-augmented underwriting. In other words, we push automation through advanced analytics and technology as far as we can to focus our underwriters’ judgment on the most meaningful portions of the process, where their “instinct” honed through years of experience adds critical value. Depending on the type of business, automation can be taken close to straight-through underwriting (for example for small straightforward business policies) or may require in-depth human evaluation.
Our technology doesn’t make the decisions, but it does provide a leg up to the underwriters for any of these scenarios; it takes unnecessary administrative tasks from underwriters’ plates and frees them to do what they do best. It can also provide suggestions based on predictive analytics that help overcome individual biases and speed up decision-making by helping them quickly hone in on what really matters for their review.
In turn, by providing feedback on the algorithmic suggestions, our underwriters close the feedback loop and improve our algorithms. Working in tandem, our underwriters and technology bring out the best in each other.
That’s how Joyn delivers on one of its core value offerings: drastically reducing the length of time that the insured traditionally had to wait between sending a submission and getting a response, quote, and ultimately a bound policy. What once took several weeks or months can now be reduced to hours or days, with brokers and insureds benefitting from a process that is faster, more accurate, and more transparent therein saving time, costs, and frustration.
A look at our team shows just how much we believe in this: alongside the underwriting and distribution professionals that are the hallmark of any insurance provider, we also employ a strong cadre of technology, innovation, data, and product professionals who are fundamental to our ability to offer the innovative and industry-leading insurance products that our brokers, partners, and insureds have come to expect.
Our culture is one of constant innovation, testing, and improvement, ensuring that the brokers who choose Joyn have the opportunity to place more business and get their customers faster and better results.
Send your submissions to [email protected] to see how the process can work for you or reach out to [email protected] for more information.
