The pitch always sounds good. The demo is polished, the features impressive, and the sales team is confident. Then you try to fit a niche insurance program into it, and the wheels fall off.
That tension, between vendor promise and operational reality, sits at the center of how Jacqui Price (pictured), executive vice president of underwriting and compliance at REInsurePro, is approaching one of the more unglamorous tasks in the industry right now: making underwriting and sales workflows actually work.
REInsurePro is a national program manager that provides residential real estate investment insurance through independent agents across the country, covering tenant, occupied, vacant, and renovation properties up to 20 units. Its program design is narrow, and that specificity is precisely what makes standard technology solutions a poor fit.
Price is direct about where transformation efforts break down. Most vendors build workflows for the broadest possible market. REInsurePro is not that market.
"Our program is very niche, and what we do in the industry is unique," she said. "A lot of the challenges we find are that many vendors have an out, of, the box workflow that really doesn't work for us. We're having to make sure we can find vendors that work for our workflow, vendors that can build custom configurations so that we're not changing our business to fit their box."
The company's current focus is on removing administrative friction from its underwriting and sales teams, the kind of daily paperwork load that eats into time that should be spent with clients. "We want to take the paperwork side out of what our teams are working on every single day, give them time with clients, build relationships, and advise our clients on what they need, what coverage they should be offering their clients," Price said.
That means rethinking the underwriting process at a granular level: what questions are being asked per location, how sales workflows are structured, and where automation can replace manual steps without stripping out the judgment calls that only people can make.
Price is measured when discussing artificial intelligence. The hype is unavoidable; the application, she suggests, requires considerably more precision.
"AI is the big phrase right now, everyone's talking about it," she said. "We're really looking at what AI means to us specifically. I think all of our sales, underwriting, and claims workflows will have some AI or automation components within the next year. But we definitely want to keep humans in the loop."
The qualifier is not rhetorical. Underwriting and claims, the two functions most often targeted for AI integration, are also the two that carry the most consequential decisions for clients. "Underwriting, claims, all of that requires that human touch, that personal review or that personal reach, out," Price said. "We're trying to figure out where we can let people be people, and where we can let technology do more of what it can handle on its own."
That framing, humans doing human work, technology doing everything else, is increasingly the working definition of successful automation in specialty insurance. It is also harder to execute than it sounds, particularly when the underlying workflows are as customized as REInsurePro's.
The due diligence process for selecting technology partners is where many insurers and program managers underinvest. Price learned that lesson firsthand at industry events.
"I was at Target Markets a couple of weeks ago and I spoke with one vendor and thought, 'This sounds great.' Then I went to the next booth and thought, 'This sounds like what they do.' By the third booth, it was clear they all do essentially the same thing," she said.
The risk is not just redundancy. It is that vendors, often well, intentioned, will agree to capabilities they cannot deliver against a specific program's requirements. "The salesperson isn't going to tell you what they can't do," Price noted. "Even well, intentioned vendors may say yes to something and mean it, but still not be able to execute it the way you need."
Her prescription is methodical: understand the product in depth, ensure integration of compatibility with the company's policy administration system, and find partners willing to build to spec rather than expecting the client to adapt.
Transformation efforts without executive mandate tend to stall. At REInsurePro, the directive is explicit.
"It really starts with the decision from the top down, leadership with a clear end goal in mind," Price said. "ReinsPro's focus on technology and continuous improvement comes from our board and our CEO. The rest of the leadership team is given a clear direction: this is where we're headed, this is our three and five year plan, and we're committed to technology and to doing better."
Price also chairs a technology review function that pulls in underwriting and sales leaders to evaluate solutions against operational needs, not theoretical ones. The question driving every evaluation: what makes this process more efficient for the team and for clients?
It is a useful filter. The specialty insurance market has no shortage of technology vendors claiming transformation. The harder task, distinguishing genuine operational fit from a well, packaged demo, is what REInsurePro is building its selection process around.
The broader questions Price is wrestling with, around automation, vendor reliability, and the limits of AI in high, judgment workflows, are ones the US insurance programs market is grappling with industry, wide.
