Underwriting Management Agencies: a valuable link between insurers and policyholders who don’t fit the norm.

There are around 200 Underwriting Management Agencies (UMAs) in South Africa that partner with leading insurers to construct and underwrite insurance products for niche markets.

Insurers trust UMAs not just for their specialised expertise, but for their entrepreneurial ability to spot the insurance gaps everyone else is overlooking, and to bring the responding insurance solutions to their business.

A key asset for any UMA is its brokers. To stay competitive, broker-facing communications and processes must be brisk and efficient – unfortunately, that’s often not the case.

Many UMAs are still managing hundreds of millions of Rands worth of insurance policies on spreadsheets. Brokers still submit new policy applications to UMAs by painstakingly filling out PDFs. The UMAs must then enter the detailed information they contain into their systems. Responding to broker applications or queries adds more time. Workflows, policy management, claims processing and policy holder support are all largely manual, and spread across the business on multiple applications. 

UMAs can spend as much as 40% of their time on non-core business activities, with slow progress frustrating themselves, their brokers and their policyholders. Doing most things manually also opens  the door for human error to impact processes. 

If this is your current status quo, it’s time for a new way of doing things. It’s time to become lighter on administration and faster on turnaround – giving your team more time to strategise compelling insurance products and giving your brokers more time to sell. 

Liberating UMAs and brokers from the limits of the past

Leveraging low-code cloud software-as-a-service (SaaS), a UMA can now launch a dedicated online broker portal on which brokers can easily submit queries and applications, 24/7. The UMA can respond to them in real time, via the same portal. The UMA can also provide rating, pricing and sales tools access to brokers on the portal, enabling them to self-manage their needs to a degree. 

The portal integrates with a wider back-end insurance management platform that the UMA can use to easily and efficiently generate quotes, monitor and manage policies, process claims and add or update products. 

Through this holistic platform, much of the work that has, until now, been manual for UMAs becomes all-digital – and automated wherever possible. The result is that the UMA can spend more time on optimising existing insurance products, or creating new ones, while giving its brokers more time to sell them. 

Taking the admin out of administration 

Until recently, a major challenge of the insurance value chain has been the back-end policy administration; the daily end-to-end management of all group and individual insurance products distributed by a UMA’s brokers. Policy administration meant dealing with large quantities of constantly-changing information, often across multiple applications or information sources. 

Today’s insurance policy management and administration software –  falling under the term insurtech – can make insurance administration 100% digital, scalable, agile and housed in the cloud. It gives all members of a UMA’s team the same view of consumer, policy and broker information, on a single shared platform. This enables faster communication, decision-making and outcomes.

Gain a unified cloud platform equipped with all the right tools:

Broker Portal

• Gives your brokers the ease of a 24/7 broker portal, enabling fast and efficient communication and processing between your UMA team and your brokers. 
• Brokers can self-manage many of their needs, referencing the portal’s up to date rating, pricing and quotation tables to generate accurate quotes in real-time.
• Swiftly launch and showcase new products to your brokers on the portal.

Insurance Management Platform

• Manage policies easily from application to renewal, based on complete real-time oversight.
• The platform delivers an intuitive, omnichannel user interface, reducing training times for new team members.
• User-friendly yet sophisticated fraud detection functionality that leverages behavioural analytics to raise red flags on potentially fraudulent behaviour.
• Lessens the risk of error-prone data and ensures improved compliance.

Free up more time for your growth strategy – backed by big data

With this software in place, your team would have more time to strategise and strengthen your insurance products. Yet successful decision-making, when it comes to launching or modifying insurance products, depends on effective customer, product and policy data analysis. However, most UMAs simply have too much information to sift through, from multiple sources, making that many of their decisions have to be based on guesswork. 

The insurance analytics cloud software integrated into a holistic insurance management platform is quickly able to gather large amounts of information from a number of integrated sources. Through automation and artificial intelligence, most of the required insurance data analysis can be done by the software itself, which then renders accurate customer and policy data you can use, in a highly visual and intuitive manner. 

This would free up your UMA team to focus purely on data-based decision-making, rather than data gathering.

Click2Sure: the cloud software partner for innovative UMAs

Cape Town-based Click2Sure, 2022 fintech winner in the AfricaTech Awards at VIVAtech (Paris), specialises in transforming insurance from being a paper-based, manpower-heavy undertaking into being cloud-hosted, all-digital and largely automated. 

We build white-label insurance management platforms and customer/broker portals (our software, your corporate identity) for traditional insurers, non-insurers and UMAs. We understand the time-pressures your business needs to handle – and the opportunities it must pursue, in order to stay ahead of competitors. The platforms and associated portals we build save time, minimise manual tasks, enhance efficiency and customer service and turn traditional insurance into something more agile, adaptable – and even exciting (we believe insurance can be exciting).

Click2Sure featured as a leading enabler in two recent global reports on the embedded insurance landscape, The Market Map: Embedded Insurance 2.0 and the Open and Embedded Insurance 2022 Report.

Partnering with Click2Sure: next steps

• Once we gain a close understanding of your business and current systems, our specialised developers can build you a broker portal and insurance management platform MVP in as little as a month.
  
• Our model is software as a service, so you don’t pay a hefty price in order to license an off-the-shelf software product, nor do you need to fund a complex, custom-built in-house solution.
  
• While we can integrate the solution into your existing business systems, it is much easier if we build it on our established, configured administration software.
   
• We have already created much of the underlying architecture your platform would rest on – it would  only need to be configured to fit your business niche, needs and branding.
  
• You would pay only for the implementation of the solution, and an ongoing monthly subscription fee for using the platform on our software.

In summary: change or fall behind

As the insurance sector as a whole becomes transformed by new technology, UMAs that  harness the business agility, automation, data integrity and data analytics of cloud solutions like ours will gain the edge in a very competitive wing of the insurance sector. Those that do not, will begin to fall behind. Based on recent research, we can confirm that a handful – but it’s a fast-growing handful – of South African UMAs are already leveraging the type of solution we build …

So don’t wait! Contact us here for a no-obligation intro discussion or demo today, and give yourself a business system as agile and innovative as your specialised team deserves.