The office was old and worn out. The desk set up of honeycomb style pods was awkward.
The underwriting systems and processing systems are pretty bad. Even on an insurance standard, these were bad compared to other companies I have worked for. Trying to get certain things done, such as manuscript endorsements, is painstaking. The system for processing these endorsements are awful and the levels of approval for even the simplest of endorsements are painful. This was a big competitive disadvantage as brokers knew how slow we were to getting endorsements done.
Process improvements are discussed at length but no action is taken. For example, when I started management talked about training underwriting assistants to take the back office workload off of the underwriters. Over a year later the same discussions were happening every single meeting. I took it upon myself to start training the UA's before I left. Overall this talk talk talk and no action is very commonplace unless it comes from the head of the office.
Process reviews should happen more often, they could cut down on underwriters (higher salaries) by hiring more underwriting assistants (lower salaries) and having the UA's take more administrative work.
