Senior Commercial Lines Strategy Manager

About the role

Encova Insurance is seeking a Senior Commercial Lines Strategy Manager to drive profitable growth across our commercial lines portfolio. The role supports the development and implementation of underwriting growth and profitability strategies, underwriting guidelines, and business workflow improvements.

Responsibilities

• Leverage data, market insights, and innovative practices to enhance underwriting performance and deliver a strong customer experience.
• Support profitable growth and expansion of the commercial lines portfolio through the design and development of profitability initiatives, pricing strategies, best practices, quality assurance programs, and business workflow improvements.
• Gather information on competitive and producer trends, and external market intelligence, including legal, economic, demographic, and distribution trends to build recommendations.
• Analyze opportunities for improvement in underwriting guidelines and business processes.
• Develop and maintain tools to improve agency analysis capabilities, individual risk underwriting, and the aggregate portfolio performance.
• Assist in the development of business requirements with business analysts to create functional system design.
• Present to and train internal and external stakeholders on product and service introductions, enhancements and the associated processes based on a solid understanding of and impact to field stakeholders such as agents, underwriting, customer service, marketing and policyholders.
• Create, distribute, and maintain effective resources, education materials, and documentation of underwriting processes or procedures.
• Develop guidelines, policies and procedures that address identified business needs and support the achievement of business results.
• Determine system impacts as a result of process introductions or changes.
• Develop and provide monitoring of the lines of business and industry segments and alert the industry strategy, product, and business teams of trends observed, areas of profitability, and items needing further attention.
• Provide subject matter expertise support for system changes needed for state-specific requirements and companywide initiatives.
• Provide subject matter expertise on system integration of third-party vendor products including the evaluation, recommended uses and training of underwriting associates.
• Facilitate testing and analysis of results of system upgrades.
• Develop and facilitate training for PolicyCenter/CoreSuite fundamentals, workflow procedures and new system processes.
• Analyze various third-party vendor products designed to improve profitability and efficiency.
• Manage commercial lines vendor billing processes and budgeting.
• Establish excellent working relationships with business partners and leadership to ensure they are confident in requesting assistance from the Underwriting Office.
• Provide exceptional customer service to underwriting teams and the Underwriting Office through trust and responsiveness.
• Survey business units on behalf of the Underwriting Office teams to provide input and a voice into Underwriting Office decisions/activities.
• Lead and participate in all aspects of effective quality control assessments, including conducting new and renewal account audits, monitoring, process quality assurance, assessing key performance indicators, large loss analysis, action plans, etc.
• Support both internal and external audit efforts.
• Represent Underwriting in meetings as necessary.
• Develop in-depth knowledge of commercial lines vendors and potential opportunities to build new relationships as needed.
• Write detailed proposals.
• Perform other duties and projects as assigned.

Qualifications

• A bachelor’s degree from an accredited college or university is preferred.
• Seven years of commercial lines experience or comparable experience in the U.S. Property & Casualty industry in areas such as analytics, actuarial science, etc. is preferred.
• Chartered Property Casualty Underwriter (CPCU) or other industry designations are preferred.
• General knowledge of insurance industry, practices, standards, and concepts within related operations and field work.
• Demonstrated analytical skills including expertise in a variety of qualitative and quantitative techniques and data analytics approaches.
• Strong analytic capabilities and experience using data to solve critical business cases.
• Understanding and prior experience integrating predictive analytics into underwriting appetite and rate determination.
• Demonstrated initiative, autonomy, commitment to innovation and process improvements and the ability to think strategically, balanced with practical day-to-day execution.
• Excellent communication (verbal and written) and interpersonal skills, with the ability to effectively convey information and provide feedback to individuals at all levels of the organization.
• Problem-solving abilities and presentation skills.
• Demonstrated expertise and success leading projects and project teams.
• Working knowledge of technology applications and support business functions.
• Strong customer service, networking and relationship skills.
• Ability to work independently with minimal guidance as well as collaboratively in a team environment.