Commercial Underwriting with Speed and Agility

With more than 30 million small businesses in the U.S. today, the marketplace for insuring these smaller commercial enterprises grows more complex and competitive every year. These business owners need a variety of coverage options, ranging from employee liability and workers’ compensation to property and casualty insurance.

But the time-consuming process of getting these small business owners quickly underwritten with accurately priced policies has long been a pain point for insurance agents.

To solve that long-standing business problem, Travelers multidisciplinary Agile teams completely redesigned and re-architected an existing system to produce Business Owner Policy (BOP) 2.0. 

This new digital capability provides agents with greater flexibility, faster workflow and real-time pricing across a broader range of customers. It also expanded the classes of small businesses eligible for coverage, enabling 200+ coverage options and multiple discount choices. With its intuitive screens and pre-filled application data from third-party sources, this modernized business classification system relies on machine-learning (a form of artificial intelligence or AI) to create a market-leading capability for Travelers.

“The agents and brokers who sell our products have really welcomed the flexibility, expanded offerings, built-in decision support and new policy discounts delivered by BOP 2.0,” says Mike Collins, Senior Vice President and CIO of Travelers’ Business Insurance segment.

Since its initial pilot in July 2019 and official launch in January 2020, BOP 2.0 is now available to Travelers agents across 46 states. It’s making an impact in the small commercial insurance space, which is a $3 billion per year business for Travelers. It was an especially welcome new business offering for agents and brokers struggling with the economic hardships of the 2020 pandemic year.

“The pandemic has forced some radical changes in how businesses operate and leverage technology,” Collins notes. “We’re seeing probably the most significant technology changes of the past three decades happening right now.”

BOP 2.0’s AI-powered recommendation engine and built-in decision support tools leverage geospatial and third-party data to accelerate an agent’s ability to figure out the right business types based on information as minimal as typing in a name and street address.

Being able to offer real-time recommendations to agents during the underwriting process cut the number of questions new customers had to answer by 70%. In the past, getting to the level of detail required to issue an accurate policy quote to a small business owner typically required agents to answer more than 40 questions. With BOP 2.0, thanks to sophisticated user experience design and modernized business classification, agents must ask customers as few as nine eligibility questions.

The new platform makes quoting and issuing small business policies easier and faster than ever, with built-in flexibility to meet the unique needs of individual small business owners.