Picture this: Your customer needs a high-risk surety bond with a large bond limit. You submit an application to your traditional surety carrier on your customer’s behalf and receive a response indicating that the bond will not be approved unless your customer provides financials. What ensues is an arduous series of back-and-forths between you, the underwriter and your customer in an attempt to provide the surety company with the required information. The underwriter then manually reviews your customer’s financial information, and, after what feels like an eternity, your customer’s bond is issued.
This is how financial underwriting works in the surety industry.
Now picture this: Your customer provides their financial information directly through the bond application, the surety provider’s software automatically reviews the information in seconds and the bond is immediately quoted and ready to be issued. Your customer is amazed at how easy it was to obtain a high-risk bond, which in turn makes you look extremely good.
See also: How Automation Can Address Today's Growing Underwriting Challenge
What It Is
Automated financial underwriting allows the surety provider to systematically review financial statements, verify assets and underwrite the risk without human intervention. With automated financial underwriting, the surety provider can instantly quote and issue bonds that previously took hours or even days due to the need to review financial statements.
Without automated financial underwriting, human underwriters must carefully review each aspect of your customer’s financial statements. This can cause exasperating delays.
Why It Matters
President Theodore Roosevelt famously said, “Nothing in this world is worth having or worth doing unless it means effort, pain [and] difficulty…” I would counter that Teddy never tried to obtain a surety bond that was subject to financial underwriting.
Automated financial underwriting presents a better path forward for agents than the status quo and eliminates one of the primary pain points associated with obtaining larger surety bonds.
