Background

Winning the Zurich Insurance Innovation Championship was a proud milestone for Sixfold, but the true achievement has been partnering with Zurich North America's Middle Market team to solve a key challenge: reducing manual workloads in submission reviews so underwriters can focus on higher-value priorities

During Zurich Innovation Championship Demo Day, Amy Nelsen, Head of Underwriting Operations for U.S. Middle Market at Zurich North America, and Sixfold CEO Alex Schmelkin shared the impressive results of the collaboration.

Challenges

Underwriters face incredible demands in their day-to-day work.

Underwriters face incredible demands in their day-to-day work. They balance multiple roles, acting as salespeople, risk analysts, researchers, and pricing experts—all while manually sorting through thousands of pages of insurance data weekly.

The administrative tasks combined with high submission volumes created bottlenecks in processing cases efficiently, leaving less time for high-value decision-making.

Process

Nearly 4,000 pages of insurance data were analyzed with 16 Zurich underwriters using Sixfold to process over 80% of their cases.

Designed to reduce manual work and improve risk assessments, Sixfold’s AI solution was customized over the course of four weeks to help Zurich underwriters work more efficiently. Nearly 4,000 pages of insurance data were analyzed with 16 Zurich underwriters using Sixfold to process over 80% of their cases.

Results

Case processing time was reduced by nearly 50%, giving underwriters more time to focus on strategic tasks.

Case processing time was reduced by nearly 50%, giving underwriters more time to focus on strategic tasks. The feedback from underwriters has been overwhelmingly positive, emphasizing how they can now gain a clear picture of a risk in a matter of seconds —eliminating the need to piece together all the risk information on their own.

During Zurich Insurance's Investor Day 2024—where the company revealed its highest financial targets to date—Sixfold was highlighted as a key part of their future strategy to improve underwriting efficiency and accuracy.