Ask most people to describe a great underwriter and they’ll still start with technical mastery – product knowledge, pricing expertise, portfolio management. Those foundations aren’t going away.
But in a recent international webinar hosted by Send, two senior specialty market leaders argued that the skills evolving fastest in underwriting aren’t technical at all – they’re human.
Caroline Bedford (pictured), CEO of UK‑based innovation firm EDII, told the audience that so‑called soft skills have effectively become the “new hard skills”. In her work with underwriters and brokers, she prefers to call them “discovery skills”: the capabilities that help people make sense of ambiguity, interrogate models and emerging tech, and uncover insights that aren’t obvious on the surface.
Alongside her on the panel, Marie Biggas, CUO at SCOR’s specialty business, was blunt about the expectations now placed on underwriters. In her words, they “need to have it all”: the ability to digest and interpret more data than ever before, the confidence to understand and challenge AI and model outputs, and the communication skills to speak a language that brokers and clients can relate to.
For a Canadian audience in a heavily brokered market, that last point is critical. A renewal conversation that boils down to “this is the price because the model said so” simply doesn’t fly with risk managers or boards in Toronto, Calgary or Vancouver.
One of the most useful ideas to come out of the discussion is the reframing of soft skills as discovery skills. Bedford highlights three in particular: curiosity, collaboration and digital comfort.
Curiosity, in this context, is not just a personality trait but a discipline – the habit of asking better questions, refusing to accept the status quo and probing beyond what the model or system suggests. Collaboration means refusing to underwrite in a silo and knowing when to pull in data scientists, technologists, claims specialists, distribution leads or risk engineers. Digital comfort does not mean every underwriter has to become a coder; it means being willing to experiment with new tools, understand their limits, and choose the right partners to augment human judgment.
For Canadian carriers and MGAs, these dimensions will feel familiar. Many organisations have invested heavily in systems and data, but still struggle with how to question and use the insights they produce. Distribution remains relationship‑driven, yet the solutions that win often cut across underwriting, analytics and claims. By repositioning these abilities as discovery skills rather than “nice‑to‑have” personality traits, insurers can begin to treat them as trainable, measurable and promotable.
When asked to pick a single soft skill that separates high‑performing underwriters from the rest, Biggas went straight to adaptability. She described the current moment as an “industrial revolution of insurance.” Underwriters, in her view, have to hold onto the best of traditional experience while being willing to continuously challenge how they look at risks, portfolios and their own biases. Anyone who insists that what made them successful in the past is all they need for the future is going to struggle.
Bedford’s “yin” to that “yang” is curiosity. For much of her own career, she said, asking too many questions could be seen as disruptive or even unwelcome. Now, many insurers are explicitly training people in curiosity and insight, building curiosity into competency frameworks, and even measuring it as a behaviour in performance reviews. Questioning is no longer a nuisance; it is a professional expectation.
These two traits are highly relevant to Canada’s own talent and market challenges. The industry here is dealing with climate‑driven volatility, rapidly evolving cyber and specialty risks, and changing customer expectations around speed and transparency. At the same time, a wave of experienced underwriters is moving towards retirement, and early‑career talent is arriving with different expectations and greater digital comfort. For leaders, the implication is straightforward: recruit and promote for adaptability and curiosity as rigorously as you do for technical excellence.
You might expect early‑career underwriters and analysts to be natural disruptors. In practice, Bedford said, many look up at senior people who have “done it this way” for years, made good money and built reputations, and conclude that copying those behaviours is the safest career strategy.
That isn’t a generational failing; it’s a cultural design choice. Bedford sees the biggest step changes where organisations explicitly give early‑career talent permission to challenge processes and then back that up with concrete opportunities. Some firms nominate grads and associates as innovation “champions” and include them in cross‑functional projects. Others pair open‑minded underwriters with data and tech teams on specific initiatives so both sides learn from each other.
For Canadian carriers facing succession and knowledge‑transfer issues, this is a practical lever. Pairing junior underwriters with analytics teams on a narrow, high‑impact problem – for example, improving submission triage or cleaning a particular portfolio’s data – can be a low‑risk way to develop discovery skills on both sides while shaking up entrenched habits.
Everyone in the industry agrees that communication, collaboration and critical thinking are important. The problem is that, in many organisations, they remain largely invisible. They are assumed to be innate rather than developable, rarely defined in concrete behavioural terms, and don’t always show up explicitly in promotion criteria or training budgets.
The panel’s message to leaders is to stop treating these skills as organic and start treating them like any other professional competency. That begins with naming them – curiosity, adaptability, digital fluency, stakeholder management – and articulating what “good” looks like in day‑to‑day underwriting. An underwriter who regularly challenges model outputs with data‑driven questions, or who proactively involves data and tech counterparts early in product changes, is demonstrating discovery skills in a way that can be observed, coached and evaluated.
From there, it becomes much easier to invest in practice and coaching, whether through broker role plays, scenario‑based training on explaining AI‑assisted decisions, or cross‑functional problem‑solving sessions. For Canadian insurers already refreshing competency models or leadership programs, building discovery skills into those frameworks is an obvious next step.
