Transforming Insurance: Submissions Automation & Workflow Enrichment

Picture this: Your mid-sized insurance company specializes in personal and commercial auto coverage across North America. Each day, your underwriting team receives about 150 new vehicle policy submissions through email, agent portals, and your company website in formats such as PDFs, spreadsheets, etc.

Underwriters spend an average of 20-30 minutes organizing 15-25 data points per submission before actual risk assessment begins. Incomplete fields require additional follow-up, which further delays processing, leading to missed opportunities to generate new premium revenue.

The Admin Bottleneck in Claims Processing

J.D. Power's 2024 U.S. Auto Claims Satisfaction Study concluded that administrative tasks consume 30% of the 17.5-day average an auto claim takes to process from FNOL to settlement.

Why Automate Submissions?

Adopting intelligent solutions such as Inflow helps automate and streamline the submissions process—redirecting employee efforts to higher-value tasks, ultimately increasing underwriting productivity. These platforms leverage AI to extract and categorize data from various formats received across channels.

They not only understand context such as writer intent and email threads but also support multi-language and handwriting recognition. You can also arrange submissions by priority and fine-tune your risk assessment—all while maintaining your existing systems and team. Neat, right?

Submissions Automation: How it works

A submissions automation platform like InFlow can be integrated with any channel or platform from which you receive submission information, like your email, agent portal, or messages. When a submission document enters the system, the AI model extracts and classifies the data. This is done using technology like IDP (Intelligent Document Processing), which combines OCR (Optical Character Recognition), Machine Learning, and NLP to read, interpret, and convert unstructured documents into structured, actionable data.

Submission In-take: Going from Structured to Unstructured

Both structured data like ACORD forms and unstructured data like e-mails and spreadsheets are easily classified, following which processed information flows into human-in-the-loop validation systems if verification is required. In case some fields are missing information, the client or broker is notified automatically via e-mail or message, as per the configured communication settings.  This increases intake accuracy, significantly aiding overworked administrative staff or underwriters.

Optimized Triage: Get Submissions to the Right Hands

This information is then triaged, which means it is classified to reflect its priority tier. This is decided based on factors such as premium size, risk complexity, deadline urgency, etc. It is then routed to an underwriter or underwriting team according to their expertise level, region they handle, etc. This ensures that each case is reviewed by the most qualified team, allowing faster and more accurate decisions.

Data Enrichment: Make informed decisions

Finally, any additional information that an underwriter would find relevant or helpful (claims history, location-based risks, etc.) is integrated with the existing information and sent to them. This process, called submission enrichment, is done automatically by the insurer's systems, which are connected to internal or external sources through API integrations. The decision of which fields require enrichment is usually a collaborative one- decided by underwriters, actuarial teams, and business analysts, among others.

Straight-Through Processing for Faster Quote-to-Bind

Underwriters receive an enriched, structured submission, which they then use to assess risk. In simple, straight-through cases, customers fitting an ideal profile- —typically having a clean history, standard coverage needs and low exposure to risks— are quickly approved with minimal manual review.

Expert Oversight for Complex Submissions

When a submission is high value, the underwriter reviews the submission manually. For example, a truck fleet owner who has a history of 3 small claims requests a tailored insurance policy with coverage in/across multiple states. In this case, the system flags the submission for review due to the interstate coverage requirements and potential risk implications based on prior claims' patterns.

Rule-based systems combine risk scores with pricing, calculating an approximate quote. The underwriter then adjusts and finalizes coverage based on their professional assessment.

Getting Started

Underwriters spend up to 40% of their time on non-core and administrative tasks—costing the insurance industry an estimated $85–$160 billion in efficiency losses over five years (Why AI in Insurance Claims and Underwriting). Automating submissions cuts down on these repetitive tasks, creating a competitive advantage where you quote faster and accelerate your SLAs—all while keeping loss ratios in check. That means more satisfied employees, happier brokers, and businesses built to last.

Supercharge insurance workflows today with InFlow. Streamline submission intake, reduce manual effort, and accelerate underwriting decisions with Insillion's process automation platform built for insurance.