As vice president of underwriting operations, inland marine, for Argo Group, part of Korey Bruner's job is to listen to complaints.
"I listen to what underwriters and support teams are struggling with, things like: 'I wish this button did this' or 'This process takes forever,' and I turn those pain points into solutions," says Bruner, who joined Argo in 2024. "I identify where things can run smoother and then make those improvements happen."
When she arrived at Argo, she learned of a glaringly obvious pain point for the inland marine underwriters: They had no streamlined way to rate, quote, bind or issue a policy. They relied on manual processes and Excel spreadsheets, as well as "quote generator" software that could take four hours to produce a single quote.
She advocated for a streamlined digital solution, then was named to help lead the Fusion project: to collaborate with Argo's internal IT team to create a quote-to-bind digital platform from scratch with Microsoft Power Apps.
Bruner says her background in automation and process improvement made her a natural fit to help lead the project. She's worked 15 years in the insurance industry, working in underwriting support and managing support teams and process enhancements, with experience across general liability, transportation, property and public entity insurance lines.
The project's biggest challenge was that it had to start from scratch, Bruner says.
"Fusion was a clean slate because we had no base model, no existing framework to build on," she says. "Every data entry point, every field, every template had to be built manually."
"It forced us to rethink how we worked from the ground up and think through what data we needed, how it should flow, what the user experience should look like and how we could make the entire quoting and binding process faster and more accurate," she says.
Fusion also represented a fresh start from a company culture perspective, Bruner says. "It gave our team a chance to rebuild trust, collaborate across departments and create something together that fundamentally changed how we do business."
The Fusion software transformed how the business operated, according to Argo. Policies that once took an average of 45 days to issue now take three days, and underwriters can now produce a quote with Fusion in about four minutes. Speed and accuracy have increased, partly because Fusion uses a standardized language and standardized forms and processes.
For the project, Bruner led the effort to define technical requirements for more than 100 product lines and oversaw the development of quote letters, bind letters and rating logic. She also designed the workflow to connect the quoting process to policy issuance, and she helped lay the groundwork to connect the workflow to policy administration.
Subsequent phases of Fusion have expanded the software to enable underwriters to quote multiple coverages within one policy instead of having to do each of them separately. By yearend, Fusion will be scaled up to contain 35 inland marine products.
Working on Fusion was also rewarding in that the project helped change how people in the company collaborate, Bruner says.
"It brought people together from every corner of the organization," she says. "People who might never have worked side by side before were suddenly solving problems together, learning from each other and moving in the same direction."
.
