N2G platform meets international insurers' business needs

N2G, an underwriting platform that streamlines the international commercial insurance experience and offers multinational quotes across business lines, was recently recognized for the 2023 Celent Model Insurer award for Digital and Emerging Technologies. The system was founded in 2020, when Nationwide and Generali Global Corporate and Commercial joined together with the goal to create a single source of global insurance for corporate and commercial clients.

"Many teams actually worked really hard for nearly two years to bring this whole system to life…" says Christian Zwingel, chief operations officer of N2G. "It's a nice recognition that we are on the right path and it's not something that is then taken for granted, and it's a nice motivation for what's next."

Nationwide and Generali recognized the often lengthy and disjointed process of multinational quoting – underwriting and quoting systems across multinational business lines are traditionally separated and dispersed throughout different departments of an organization, requiring multinational clients to navigate many different departments or companies to review coverage for their U.S. or international business operations. Together, Nationwide and Generali formed N2G to solve this issue and create a more streamlined experience for multinational clients.

The N2G teams inherited two large carrier systems and were tasked with combining the two systems.

"...We realized there's not a single system that addresses all of our needs, which is pipeline management, document management, rating, policy issuance and even capturing the data in the back-end to do portfolio management…" states Zwingel. "We realized we'd have to build our own ecosystem of systems. So we basically picked the best of different systems that they had to offer, and from the beginning, worked really hard to integrate them in a tight process."

Within 20 months, the N2G teams had created a functional system that meets the needs of multinational companies and provides a single source for processes in underwriting and policy issuance across business lines. The system continues to provide customers with a simpler purchasing process – according to N2G, 70% of its users say that the platform is easy to use. 

Moving forward, N2G has three main goals. 

First, the team plans to add a global property rate to issuance capability. Zwingel says, "Our system today is really only addressing the needs for our liability products from a domestic and international point of view. So what we're currently working on is bringing on our property line of business as well, both domestic and international…" 

Its second goal is to enhance the system with an underwriting workbench, Zwingel describes as a place "where you can then enter account information and risk information, summarized onto a single view [and] giving an underwriter an overview of the actual exposure and account. … We just want to bring it all together into a single screen and facilitate the risk analysis for our underwriters."

N2G's third goal is to create a solid underwriting desktop that functions across all business lines, focusing on automation and simplification, where underwriters can find information about an insured from one source.