Underwriting

The underwriting team at Munich Re UK & Ireland Life consists of medical, research and development underwriters all with many years of experience across life and living benefits.

Our philosophy is to deliver underwriting excellence and to work with you using our local and global knowledge to attain both profitable and predictable insurance results.

We offer effective and efficient risk management of large and complex referrals, with a market leading capacity and we pride ourselves on frequently exceeding our client focussed SLA agreements.

At Munich Re we offer access to guidelines on risk assessment through our underwriting manual, MIRA (Munich Re Internet Risk Assessor). MIRA is updated regularly with an evidenced based approach underpinning our philosophy. We promote MIRA as an underwriting guide and appreciate you may adopt your own philosophies based on your experience and portfolio of business. You can find out more about MIRA by following this link.

We provide a number of client services. These include personalised training, consultancy, benchmarking, electronic underwriting rules development plus audits and process reviews.

Our underwriting process review could involve looking at your entire end to end underwriting process, from the moment a sale begins to when it goes on the books – providing you with impartial advice on maximising value, or could be targeted to just one aspect of the underwriting process.

The material impact for clients from underwriting process reviews has ranged from reduced costs to an increase in efficiency. Some examples of the benefits delivered are as follows:

1. Client W approached UK & Ireland Life sensing they were requesting too many GP Reports. We reviewed a large sample of cases and recommended alternative forms evidence. After the review, our recommendations resulted in a potential cost saving of 15% of the client's medical fees budget.
   
2. Client X requested support in looking at their underwriting process due to feedback received suggesting the underwriting elapsed time was out of step with the market. We offered to carry out an end to end process review. After the review, we made a number of recommendations that when implemented, resulted in reduced administrative time for the client by 50%.
3. Client Y also identified that their elapsed underwriting time was increasing. Munich carried out a targeted review of additional evidence requests (follow up evidence after the original sum assured or disclosure driven evidence had been assessed). We found that approximately 40% of additional evidence requests were unnecessary. We then put a training programme in place for Client Y’s underwriting team using our cases studies from the review as a basis of the teams’ development.
4. Client Z participated in an electronic underwriting benchmarking exercise. Following the review we identified that one of their top traversed rules was accepting 92% of cases at O/R whilst industry peers were only accepting on average 77% at O/R. This highlighted that from a risk assessment perspective, the rule had been configured overly generously and needed to be re-designed.