The Myth of the Underwriting “Secret Sauce”: Why Process Isn’t the Right Differentiator

Underwriting is often treated as sacred ground—the “secret sauce” that must stay entirely in-house. But, what actually differentiates an insurer is the company’s marketing, risk appetite, rules, and tolerances as defined by leadership—not the manual's repeatable steps required to apply those rules at volume.

According to Accenture’s 2021 report, “The Future of Underwriting,” underwriters spend about 70 percent of their time on non-underwriting activities, including admin tasks and sales support—leaving only 30 percent for true underwriting judgment. Accenture correctly asserts that this misallocation of resources is a major drag on performance and growth. When expert talent is tied up rekeying data, reading email chains, and performing manual handoffs, cycle times stretch and opportunities slip away.

Speed is where process shows its age. According to a 2024 benchmark study by Hyperexponential, “The State of Commercial P&C Underwriting,” it takes about eight days from submission to quote and another 12 days from quote to bind on average in commercial P&C markets. This is valuable time during which a faster competitor can win the business. Other industry snapshots, like a report published by Willis Towers Watson in 2023, peg typical quote-to-bind times at one to two weeks, depending on line of business and complexity. None of that lag has to do with the uniqueness of an insurer’s risk philosophy. It’s operational drag in the steps that execute it.

McKinsey & Co.’s “P&C Underwriting Transformation” from 2023 reinforces the gap between strategy and execution. In analyzing P&C underwriting transformation initiatives, McKinsey found that digitized underwriting can improve loss ratios by three to five points, lift new-business premiums ten to 15 percent, and increase retention in profitable segments by five to ten percent—gains driven by better data usage and faster, more consistent processing rather than changes to risk appetite. 

Taken together, these data points expose a simple conclusion: the secret sauce is the playbook, not the plumbing. An insurer’s competitive edge lives in how eligibility, exclusions, tolerances, and escalation are defined—not in how quickly a team can copy data into multiple systems or chase missing documents.

Consider two common failure points:
1.    Backlogs masquerading as strategy. When volumes spike, experienced underwriters get pulled into intake, sorting, and status updates. Accenture’s research for “The Future of Underwriting” found that this pattern has persisted for years. Even with new tools, most underwriters say tech hasn’t meaningfully reduced their non-core workload. 
2.    Cycle-time erosion that looks like risk conservatism. A ten-day quote is indistinguishable from a “no” in many distribution channels. Hyperexponential’s 2024 report, “The State of Commercial P&C Underwriting,” shows the delay clearly. Insurers that compress quote-to-bind windows win disproportionately without touching appetite. 

The fix is not to dilute what makes you different. It’s to separate judgment from execution. That means codifying rules in an accessible, auditable way; embedding them into workflows; and ensuring the operational layer applies them consistently, quickly, and at scale. 

A practical roadmap to better underwriting should involve:
•    Codifying and centralizing the rules. Move guidelines out of PDFs and into structured, searchable formats. Define clear triggers for straight-through processing (STP) versus human review. 
•    Designing for speed to decision. Map handoffs and kill rekeying whenever possible. Even modest automation can reclaim hours per submission and shrink cycle time. 
•    Flexing capacity without sacrificing control. When volumes swing, keep the company’s risk framework in-house but scale the application of it with trained, U.S.-based execution teams that work inside your systems and service level agreements (SLAs). The rules remain yours; the rigor scales up or down as needed. 
•    Making cycle time a high-priority KPI. As McKinsey’s report emphasizes, underwriting productivity, quality, and customer satisfaction is typically tracked in dashboard, not monthly summaries. This makes faster diagnosis and intervention possible.  

If an insurer values underwriting teams or sees them as indispensable because of the uniqueness or fragility of the process, it is the process—not the people—that needs attention. Anecdotally, everyone in the industry knows an underwriter who is asking for relief from non-core tasks so they can “underwrite more”, and "meet with more brokers".  This becomes possible when insurers realize that the “secret sauce” isn’t the keystrokes. It’s the rules. Treat execution as the performance engine that brings those rules to life—fast, consistent, and auditable—and the gains follow.

Peter Crowe is the president of FOCUS. He can be reached for further information or comment via email at peter.crowe@teamfocusins.com.