QBE Partners with Federato to Achieve Business-Led Underwriting Transformation

With a focus on portfolio optimization, underwriting efficiency, and profitability, QBE North America has been on a mission to simplify a day in the life of an underwriter and bring uniformity to risk selection decision-making.

Responsible for more than $11.5B in gross written premium globally, QBE had made numerous attempts to digitally transform its underwriting operations and grow its North American Commercial and Specialty lines business. Frustrated by vendors and projects that ran over timeline and budget, while failing to meet underwriter expectations, QBE’s business leadership looked to Federato.

"Federato’s AI-powered RiskOps platform aligns with our business objectives to give our underwriters a unified, real-time view of disparate internal and third-party data to consistently evaluate, price, and bind individual accounts.”

Michael Foley, President of Commercial Insurance

The Challenge

Like many insurance carriers, QBE’s underwriters and senior leadership struggled to gain a complete and proactive view of complex, multi-line business. Past projects to unify and synthesize diverse data had failed to meet QBE’s business goals due to an inability to reach across complex data silos to serve up the real-time data that underwriters needed at the point of sale.

The Solution

QBE is taking full advantage of Federato’s RiskOps underwriting platform, which uses a federated data graph to bring all data into a single pane of glass.

The Implementation

In fall 2022, following a user acceptance testing period that included 30+ hours of user interviews, 4 days of on-site sessions, and daily virtual IT stand-ups, QBE moved directly into production with an initial cohort of 50 underwriters. They are now in full production with 300+ underwriters across 7 lines working in the RiskOps platform daily to transact more and more business. The Federato team has become a trusted partner and fully integrated extension of QBE’s underwriting, operations, and IT teams.

The Results

Since deploying RiskOps, QBE’s underwriters have experienced a marked improvement in productivity with less time spent on manual tasks like searching for information and rekeying data. Business and actuarial leadership have observed measurable improvements in underwriting precision and performance. QBE projects a payback period of <12 months with an internal rate of return of 70-400%.

"When you consider that we’re putting out tens of millions of dollars’ worth of limit, just one account with a better risk decisioning framework can pay for IT transformation for decades. Multiply that across a portfolio and the potential return on Federato’s RiskOps platform becomes abundantly clear.”

Greg Puleo, Vice President, Digital Transformation