This article was created in partnership with ICAT
In the property insurance space, precision, resilience and agility are not just buzzwords, they're requirements. At the heart of ICAT’s approach to underwriting is a clearly defined culture designed to foster trust, empower decision-making and continually evolve through feedback loops between underwriting, loss control and claims.
Speaking to IB, ICAT’s president Ashleigh Cashman (pictured) revealed that for her people, underwriting is way more than a technical evaluation - it’s a creatively collaborative discipline.
“Any culture starts with a need for transparency and trust. [Here], inquisitiveness is also very important as we think about underwriting and making ourselves better. [At ICAT] we identify our underwriting culture within four pillars. [Firstly], we engage often in qualitative debates - [that’s about] encouraging the team to challenge each other in a safe space and bring intellectual curiosity to the table.”
The second pillar, Cashman explained, is thought leadership - underpinned by a drive for continuous improvement and market leadership.
“We talk a lot about thought leadership - focusing on always learning and being market leaders in what we’re doing from an underwriting, loss control and claims perspective.”
The third pillar is technical skills - a foundation that exceeds the industry standard. “We go beyond the model [in order to] learn from each other, [always improving our] training and enhancing our technical skills across the team,” added Cashman.
Finally, there’s community, which reflects ICAT’s belief that trust and respect are prerequisites for productive learning.
“This is more about our general culture. As I said, trust and respect is very important if we’re going to be able to challenge each other and do so in a productive way. We have to be willing and able to share knowledge across the teams and celebrate [each other’s] success.”
And beneath these four pillars lies an even deeper foundation - there’s an underpinning concept of empowerment and accountability, something which Cashman takes very seriously.
“It’s important that all the underwriters are displaying [accountability]... I think underwriting is somewhat of an art, and not everyone’s going to agree with your decision, so the underwriters need to be accountable for those decisions.”
Loss control and claims integration
At ICAT, underwriting doesn’t end once the policy is bound. Instead, the company has developed a deeply integrated loop between its underwriting, loss control, and claims operations - specifically through its Boulder Claims team. Founded in 2005, Boulder Claims is a wholly-owned subsidiary of ICAT which provides comprehensive claims services on claims from policies underwritten by ICAT.
“We’ve started using aerial imagery and AI to get a look at the risk at the time of underwriting,” added Cashman. “But we still feel like it’s really important for us to get actual eyes on the risk after we bind an account, and that’s where our loss control team comes into play.”
With six full-time staff on its loss control team, ICAT ensures that underwriters receive timely, actionable feedback from field inspections. As Cashman told IB, having that internally is really valuable - because they’re able offer up immediate feedback.
“We will have someone that is out inspecting a property, and he or she will pick up the phone and call an underwriter and say ‘this isn’t the quality that we want to be on - let’s put this on notice of cancellation immediately’.
“Having Boulder Claims capabilities in-house, having the claims folks be able to sit on the same floor as the underwriters, [it creates a] constant feedback loop. They’re there to give us feedback on underwriting guideline changes, proposed forms changes... when we have claims of note, we can sit down and talk through how might we have thought about that differently from an underwriting perspective based on how the coverage is being interpreted.”
The real advantage of this interdepartmental synergy shows up when loss trends start to emerge, especially those associated with catastrophe events or claims inflation. Cashman outlined how Boulder Claims’ input helps ICAT keep its underwriting guidelines agile and responsive.
“Boulder Claims is very integrated into the underwriting team,” explained Cashman. “We have various forums at ICAT – we have our technical underwriting committee that is in charge of governance and maintenanceof underwriting guidelines. [Boulder Claims are] part of that group. They’re also part of our risk management committee, where we talk about exposures and how we manage the optimal book of business. Whenever there is a proposed change to how we view risk, Boulder Claims is part of the discussion.”
One notable example of this collaboration involves how ICAT is addressing the challenge of social inflation.
“Boulder Claims has been really valuable in providing feedback is how we are reacting to the concept of social inflation and claims inflation, and what we can do to mitigate that from an underwriting perspective.”
This feedback has led to concrete product changes. As Cashman explained, there are forms that ICAT has adapted based on feedback over time.
“We implemented a mutual appraisal clause in 2021 which was guided by their thoughts on how that could help mitigate loss creep. And we saw that play out really well in Hurricane Ian.”
For ICAT, the goal of collaboration is not just responsiveness but also resilience. Cashman was quick to emphasize that this synergy between claims and underwriting culminates in a highly structured, deliberate review process following major events.
“We do deliberate loss reviews every year and following CAT events as well. We look at the business from a claims handling perspective, an underwriting perspective, and from a modelling perspective, and how we performed against expectations.”
At the end of the day, it’s this holistic approach which allows ICAT to refine its risk appetite and recalibrate expectations in a controlled and transparent manner. ICAT’s commitment to its capital providers is to produce predictable results. The robust process that they employ to do a deep dive into their core cultural pillars has enabled them to deliver on this promise.
