Two Sigma IQ enters next phase with SubmissionIQ

Underwriting technology company Two Sigma Insurance Quantified, with its launch of a new service and the help of a new advisory council, has aimed to underwrite more coverage while reducing risk for commercial P&C insurers and MGAs.

After selling off Attune, its joint venture with AIG and Hamilton Insurance, last October, Two Sigma IQ is emphasizing its SubmissionIQ underwriting workbench product. SubmissionIQ takes "the business coming in through the front door, understands everything about it and what the broker sends, then enriches it with third-party data," said Brian Modesitt, CEO of Two Sigma IQ.

SubmissionIQ analyzes the risk in underwriting submissions, which Modesitt said is unique among underwriting operations products. "There are companies doing pieces of it. They might do ingestion. They might do what some call risk operations," he said. 

By capturing all the data available on underwriting a risk ahead of time rather than after a policy is written, an insurer has a better chance of flagging concerns, Modesitt explained. "If an underwriter is underwriting commercial trucking, what might they want to know? Information about the vehicles, information about the drivers, information about the cargo, loss history," he said. "We present the underwriter a dashboard where all of those are available and they can click back to the source document if they want to investigate it. They can actually go and do the work that they have always done.

"We do flag things," Modesitt added. "We might say information came in through the broker that there were vehicles that had these characteristics. Then we pull VIN information and look at that information and we might find a slight mismatch between what the broker presented and what the third-party data says. Sometimes the application data is right and sometimes the third-party data is right. We flag things that are inconsistent. We point out what they might want to look at more carefully."

SubmissionIQ can scan PDF reports to find and flag key relevant information for underwriting, noting differences from how a similar risk was previously underwritten. SubmissionIQ reads IRS and SEC forms to seek information concerning risks. The service also compares and contrasts underwriting submissions and can see how consistent a user's underwriting choices are, according to Modesitt. "It might say, this one looks very different than some of the other ones. Maybe you need to look at this a little bit more carefully or think about why it is in the same bucket," he said.

Having an organized data set is an important prerequisite to analytics for underwriting, and Two Sigma IQ aims to provide this as part of SubmissionIQ, according to Modesitt. "That's the key thing that the industry has struggled with having," he said. "Organized data structured in a way that one can do analytics on it, and be able to present that for underwriting."

Two Sigma IQ drew upon the expertise and knowledge of its advisory council to build SubmissionIQ. In September, strategic advisors David Michelson and Edward Sweeney Jr. joined Two Sigma IQ co-founder and co-chairman David Siegel and John "Jay" Nichols, the company's strategic advisor, to form the advisory council. Michelson is a consultant and formerly the CEO, president and senior advisor at National Interstate Insurance Company. Sweeney was most recently an executive vice president at Guy Carpenter & Co. and has advised global insurance companies for more than 40 years.

"They give us insights about what underwriters should be using technology for based on their experience," said Modesitt. "They're intimately involved with many of the aspects and operations of our business almost on a daily basis."