Specialty insurance has long operated through manual workflows, fragmented systems, and heavy reliance on email communication. At H.W. Kaufman Group, a broad transformation program is underway to modernize those processes and move the business toward structured data exchange and integrated technology platforms.
For Rich Fusinski (pictured), group chief information officer, senior vice president at H.W. Kaufman Group the effort reflects a broader recognition that while specialty insurance may be complex, its systems do not have to remain outdated. “Specialty insurance has to change from being archaic, email-based ways of doing business into more modern structured data exchange,” he said. “Just because it’s arcane doesn’t mean that all of our systems need to be archaic.”
The transformation effort is particularly significant in the wholesale distribution space, where H.W. Kaufman Group’s Burns & Wilcox division operates. Unlike banking or other financial sectors, wholesale insurance lacks a large marketplace of ready-made software solutions tailored to its needs. As a result, many firms have historically assembled their technology environments from multiple niche products that only address part of the workflow.
“If you’re a bank, you have a hundred different vendors that you can go to to find a solution for just about everything,” Fusinski said. “There are not enough US wholesalers to be interesting, so you can go out and buy these targeted solutions that solve this much of your problem, and then you can cobble them all together into a toolbox, and you end up with a whole bunch of things that don’t really work well together.”
Rather than adopting that patchwork approach, the company has chosen to develop more integrated systems internally. The goal is not only to build best-of-breed capabilities but also to ensure that the overall experience feels seamless to employees, partners, and clients. “We’ve taken the opposite approach and we said the answer is to build - not just build best-of-breed solutions, but really build things that feel seamless to our internal users, as well as our external customers and our partners,” Fusinski said.
At the center of that strategy is the development of an internal workbench designed to support brokers and underwriters with guided workflows and integrated tools. Salesforce plays a foundational role in the architecture, handling workflow management and application design while providing a common platform for building new capabilities. By leveraging that infrastructure, the organization can concentrate its efforts on creating business value rather than maintaining underlying systems.
“Salesforce really is our foundation for delivering all of these services,” Fusinski said. The internal workbench supports submission management, marketing workflows, and document collaboration, including integration with Box for document editing and sharing. Because the system is API-native, it also positions the organization to exchange data directly with carriers and retail agencies rather than relying on manual processes.
Another major element of the transformation program is the development of straight-through processing capabilities through a platform called IssueQuick. The system allows retail brokers to quote, bind, and issue certain policies entirely online without requiring human intervention.
“As a retailer, you can come to Burns & Wilcox to IssueQuick online and you can quote, bind, issue a policy in five minutes,” Fusinski said.
The platform currently supports five products, and the company plans to expand the offering further in the coming year. One upcoming feature will introduce comparative rating functionality, allowing brokers to review multiple options before completing a transaction within the same platform. Fusinski said that approach goes beyond traditional rating tools by enabling the full policy issuance process digitally.
“It is zero human touch,” he said. “You can go and not just get options and have them routed to a human, but have it be fully self-service, 100% automated.”
Automation and artificial intelligence represent the third pillar of the company’s transformation strategy. Fusinski said the organization has already deployed several AI-driven tools designed to improve productivity and help employees navigate complex underwriting information more quickly. Some of these tools enable staff to search carrier underwriting manuals and marketing materials, helping them identify which markets have appetite for specific risks.
“We already have deployments of AI tools here that our business is using,” he said. “We’re finding use out of these things. It’s not ‘if,’ or even ‘when’ - it’s now.”
Artificial intelligence is also being used within the technology function itself, accelerating the pace of application development and allowing teams to build new tools more quickly. While Fusinski is enthusiastic about the technology’s potential, he emphasized the importance of maintaining appropriate safeguards in a regulated industry.
“There is always a human in the loop for every decision,” he said. “We make it very clear that this is AI assistance and that, it can be wrong.”
Even with those guardrails, the technology is already changing how work gets done across the organization. Tasks that once required lengthy manual analysis can now be completed far more quickly with AI-assisted tools.
“Some of these analyses might take a human two hours to do and you can get from an AI in two minutes,” Fusinski said. “It really is a game changer in some respects for various parts of the organization.”
While the transformation program is large in scope, Fusinski said innovation within the organization is not driven primarily by board directives or top-down mandates. Instead, many new ideas originate within teams across the business as employees look for ways to address everyday operational challenges.
“It’s not board-driven. It’s definitely people-driven,” he said.
Artificial intelligence is helping accelerate that bottom-up innovation. In the past, smaller operational improvements often struggled to gain priority because they required extensive development work or changes to core systems. With modern development tools and AI-assisted coding, many of those solutions can now be delivered much more quickly.
“AI changes the equation on that, where you can rapidly turn around things and it doesn’t matter as much if it’s off to the side, because you were able to do it ten times faster,” Fusinski said.
Rather than creating a dedicated AI team, the organization is encouraging employees across departments to develop familiarity with the technology as part of their daily work. Building that capability broadly across the workforce, he said, will be essential if companies want to capture the full benefits of AI.
“I’ve made it very clear to my entire organization that everybody needs to develop this skill,” Fusinski said. “It doesn’t matter if you’re a software developer, a business analyst, in quality assurance, in infrastructure or security this needs to become part of your toolkit.”
