Bridge Specialty Group, the wholesale insurance division of Arrowhead Intermediaries, has automated 90% of the submissions for all lines of business moving through its intake process – three years after the company began layering machine learning onto a system that once relied entirely on manual review. President Anurag Batta (pictured) said the shift has cut turnaround times to two minutes, freed underwriters from data entry, and reshaped how the wholesaler serves brokers navigating the excess and surplus (E&S) market.
Batta said Bridge's transformation strategy does not start with a system or a department. It starts with three constituents: the customer, the carrier partner and the teammate.
“Is it going to make life easier for any of those three? That's where business transformation begins.”
“Right now people have so many choices, and for us to earn that space, we have to do something special. All our transformation, all our investments, all our talent is predicated on that,” Batta said.
That framing, he said, keeps Bridge from chasing technology for its own sake. Every initiative is measured against whether it simplifies a task for a broker, a carrier or a teammate – which in turn drives better experience, efficiency, speed and service levels.
Brokers reach Bridge through email, portals, ACORD applications, supplemental forms, or, in some cases, a phone call describing a risk in a sentence or two. Three years ago, every one of those submissions required a human to read it, key it in and chase missing details.
Bridge built a multichannel intake process using machine learning that now routes 90% of submissions straight into its system without a human touch, according to Batta. A human still reviews submissions for errors, but no longer keys them in manually.
“If a customer is sending 20 submissions at the same time, a human takes real time to work through all of them,” Batta said. “A machine can process them simultaneously and get answers back within minutes, which means our turnaround time and service improves, the client has a solution quickly, and our teammates can spend their time actually having a conversation and defining a solution rather than doing data entry.”
He argued that the bigger challenge is not the absence of data or information, but getting people comfortable with a new way of working – a dynamic that surfaces as wholesale brokers weigh which AI tools underwriters will actually trust across the broader E&S market.
“The way we manage change is by showing the benefits, not just talking about them,” Batta said. “We run pilots, bring people along, identify change champions who can communicate the value, and when the metrics demonstrate results and actually help people, buy-in follows naturally.”
Bridge built four highly collaborative functional teams to make this possible – technology, data, digital and operations – each led separately so that business-side judgment sits alongside the technical build. The digital team, distinct from IT, owns integration roadmaps with carrier partners and customers.
Bridge scouts' vendors at InsurTech conferences and through existing relationships, then narrows the field before running what Batta calls a bake-off – a proof-of-concept process that typically runs up to several months, reflecting a vetting discipline other wholesale brokers describe as increasingly necessary given how many insurtechs now compete for a broker's attention. The process tests capability, integration and, critically, whether a vendor understands Bridge's business.
