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[Music] hey insurance this is tony kanis and today i want to talk to you about a question that comes up very often when i'm having conversations with young insurance professionals so underwriting has gained a certain prestige within the community of of entry-level insurance people looking to grow and part of that might be my fault because i am clearly biased towards underwriting and i truly believe that underwriting is fantastic experience and it's a fantastic job most that give me a call a chat with tony by the time they give me a call they understand that underwriting is less stressful than claims and often better paid and also that underwriting tends to be a right of passage in too many other areas of psc and thus they're looking to make the move into underwriting and they understand what underwriting is underwriting chooses which policies to write what to charge for them and what conditions to offer those policies but they don't understand what the day-to-day is like so i get the question all the time what is the is the day-to-day of an underwriter life the answer of course is it depends a lot it varies a lot i've had two underwriting roles myself at very different they're very different companies and very different lines of business and they were significantly different and then i've chatted with i don't know a couple hundred other underwriters doing underwriting all sorts of different things within pnc at all different levels and the job is very very different i will do my best to kind of summarize what the different areas of underwriting look like when it comes to what their day to day is like so let's start with with personal alliance career-wise going into commercial lines is a good investment long term because a lot of personal alliance is kind of getting automated away not saying that the jobs are disappearing right away generally commercialized is more interesting pays better and also harder to automate away personalized underwriters historically would spend the day their day looking at submissions for insurance and decide with very little flexibility that the decision what was really a decision of yes we will insure this person or no we won't injure this person they didn't have a lot of ability to change conditions they didn't have a lot of ability to deviate from the filed pricing the most they could do was move the person to a preferred company within the umbrella of companies that i work for or a non-preferred if this person's a good risk i can move them to our preferred company and get them a better price if they're a bad risk i might be able to move them down to to our non-preferred company and get them a lower price but that's that's about it that was about the extent of the or that is about about the extent of authority that that your traditional personalized songwriter has if you go into high net worth on your writing then that's more meaty right those policies are more several cars bigger homes potentially homes with things that couldn't be easily replaced where you need you need functional replacement for for some of those instead of just replacement costs have different risks and they definitely get more complicated and maybe you have a little more flexibility personalized underwriting roles are getting automated away slowly and they're moving towards more of portfolio underwriting so what does portfolio underwriting look like well in portfolio underwriting most of the policies that the company writes goes straight through processing they don't get touched by an underwriter maybe at renewal but maybe not at all they definitely don't get touched about underwriter when they first get written in order to do them really fast what the underwriter is really underwriting is not a policy by policy kind of thing rather they are really underwriting the relationship with that broker that agent and how good that agent is at pre-underwriting the the business and finding the business and bringing in good business writing it with with us so you're really more underwriting that relationship than underwriting policy my policy most of the policy by policy underwriting is being done by the system nowadays so that's the move that we're seeing for portfolio underwriters analytics skills might be more importantly the ability to to look at a book and look at at the tools that we have to analyze that book rather than policy by policy decisions on the commercial line side i was a small commercial farm underwriter at nationwide ag and in my experience that job based on what i tried with other people is very similar to a small commercial underwriter in the non-ag world basically small commercial underwriting in order to to win a small commercial you have to be fast the broker the agent wants to input it in the system get a yes right away or a no right away and not have to wait for an underwriter to to look at a specific account that's generally what they look what they look at generally a lot of the of the accounts get get written pass through without seeing it on the right or maybe every new almost like they ever know but they get written right away and you only are looking at the ones that are that have a little hair on them that are a little bit of a gray and you might have some pricing power you probably had some pricing power but it's a very transactional you're looking at 20 30 40 accounts in in a day and just kind of making a quick decision and then your renewals summary rules might flow straight through and you look at the ones that have had some losses or the ones that have heavy credits or whatever that once they get flagged by the system that they should be looked at by an underwriter a policy could very well be written with the agent's binding authority go straight through be part of your book and you never actually look at it because they've never been chosen by the system because of a loss or something to get reviewed so that was very very similar to what my role within a nationwide ag farm underwriting was i had a set of agents that was assigned to me and i was your farmer underwriter and i would spend my days looking at several accounts a day whether that was new business or renewals the agents have had binding authority so really even when i was looking at new business accounts i was looking at business accounts that had already been written and what i had the ability to do was kind of flag them for renewal if we had to get off of the account or if if we had to add credits or debits or whatever we could do it at renewal but not right away we were already on the account the agent had by binding authority and agency relationships are good at that level i was supposed to go visit my agents once a year i was in des moines iowa my agents were in maryland and delaware i was supposed to go visit them once a year but really being super responsive was it is key these are low premium 500 to maybe 25 000 in premium the agent doesn't make much money on them they don't want to spend much time on on them it's just not profitable to do so it's it's a very transactional type of underwriting then i went to middle market and middle market and specialty on writing by especially underwriting i mean anything that has a word and then underwriting cyber on your writing in the marine underwriting education energy you name it all those are are similar to middle markets except this specialized to one particular area so as a middle market underwriter with liberty i had a territory in my case the territory was the state of mississippi anything that was kind of general business that didn't fall into one of the verticals that liberty had specialty under items for was mine as long as it was too big for small commercials so it couldn't be good with written on on a bop i think it was 150 or 250 000 premium up to about a million is is where liberty middle market played at that time so basically those accounts are not transactional at that level the account comes in with a conversation from the broker the submission comes in with a description or with a phone conversation with with the broker every account has some losses we have access to to lost control people to either go because you can't be an expert in everything right so if you're doing a little bit of everything in middle market you use somebody from lost control who comes from that from that type of business to either talk to the client on the phone or talk to the or go visit the client and give you a report and then you underwrite based on that report and you might spend half a day underwriting a single account you might spend more than a day on your own writing a single account in a week you might only touch four or five maybe ten accounts but it's not that 20 or 30 like a transactional 20 or 30 accounts in a day kind of things you really get to dig in deeper into it i can't really get to know them really get to know know their loss prevention and it's super interesting and also the agency relationship starts playing a lot bigger role all of a sudden and you have a lot more flexibility so so i even though i didn't live in mississippi i would fly from atlanta where i lived in mississippi once someone go visit my agent because the agency relationship really becomes a big deal in middle market middle market a lot meteor a lot fewer accounts much bigger agency relationships are much more bigger deal days are very different from from each other since you're looking at at accounts for for maybe an entire day so sometimes what about the the especially on the right first field underwriting so field underwriting what is your day like i've never done it but what i've heard basically you are out on the field with a company car and you spend your days visiting very large agencies that have a ton of commercial business and you basically underwrite it with them you basically sit down and and work through it with them and answer any questions they might have and get your questions answered and really build that relationship so it's very similar to middle market except you are in person with the agent once a week or whatever with each agency that you serve and you have very very few agencies in one geographic territory you see them in person a whole bunch and you get down and dirty with with the accounts with the agent to to make sure that you're properly on the right or on the right specialty underwriting so cyber in the marine all those they vary a lot and they vary a lot by company what you can expect is that that you will spend your days looking and becoming an expert in one specific side of insurance whether that is cyber whether that is the marine or whatever or a particular type of business education energy you'll become an expert in that type of business and you might not have uh super close relationships with the agents because you might not have a lot of agencies that that specialize in in that business your book might be two or three agencies that specialize in type of business you underwrite and you have great relations with them and then you also do some business for agents that have a middle market underwriter that's their main underwriter so that's kind of what the date today looks like within the under underwriting space those of you who are underwriters especially those of you who are specialty underwriters underwriters comment what your day-to-day is like in your particular area of underwriting thank you