The whole point of insurance is to mitigate risk: insureds want peace of mind that they’ll be covered if something happens; and insurance companies want to provide that peace of mind while turning a profit. Underwriting is the crossroads where those two interests meet. When done right, risk is evaluated and priced accurately, allowing both parties’ desires to be fulfilled.
In legacy insurance models, underwriters normally have their foot on the brakes, because evaluating risk can be tricky. While producers are driven by a desire to write business, traditional underwriters have to ensure they’re writing the right business—and doing so in a way that protects the company’s balance sheet. To achieve this, traditional underwriters tend to be skeptical. They tend to be cynical. And they tend to ask a lot of questions. This slows down the process in an effort to make sure critical information isn’t missed or overlooked.
As a corollary symptom of this underlying problem, traditional underwriters also tend to be guarded about their data and algorithms. Too often, they see it as proprietary, even if the data is publicly available. They see it as something for their use, not for producers. And so they don’t share it.
Our team at Joyn Insurance has spent decades in the insurance industry—120 years combined with our senior leadership team alone—so we know firsthand these underlying tensions and issues with the legacy models. And we engineered an approach that solves for them.
We saw an opportunity to truly change the paradigm. Our approach empowers underwriters to work collaboratively with the producers who submit business. Together, we learn about an account, look at the available data, and take the traditional skepticism out of the equation, thereby eliminating this source of tension.
Our goal from the outset was to revolutionize commercial insurance by leveraging technology, data, and expertise to create a transparent, trusted, and truly one-of-a-kind insurance experience for brokers and insureds alike. We took what brokers and their customers loathed about the insurance experience and removed those pain points from the process.
We believe at our core that connectedness around our producer relationships and cooperative efforts are important. By shifting the paradigm on how we approach underwriting, our company embodies a willingness and a transparency that is difficult to find in this industry. That allows producers to win more business, which in turn benefits everyone in our commercial insurance ecosystem.
