Guide · Submissions

Submission intake: from messy broker packet to structured submission

Submission intake is the work of turning what a broker sends, an email plus ACORDs, SOVs and supplementals, into a structured submission an underwriter can act on. It decides whether the rest of the pipeline runs on evidence or on re-keyed guesswork.

Evaluating software rather than learning the process? Start at submission intake for underwriting teams.

The packet

What arrives in a broker submission packet?

An email carrying the broker’s framing, plus ACORDs, SOVs, loss runs, risk-engineering reports and supplementals, spread across PDF, Excel, Word, PowerPoint and images. The email body often carries values that override the attachments.

The mess

Why are broker packets messy?

Three structural reasons, none of which the receiving team can fix upstream:

The same field, three values

TIV in the email, the SOV and the ACORD rarely agree. Which one the underwriter sees is usually an accident of reading order.

No two brokers alike

Every brokerage has its own SOV layout, naming habits and attachment conventions. There is no standard packet.

Reference mixed with risk

Loss runs and engineering reports sit beside the documents that define the risk, unlabelled and easy to mistake for each other.

The method

How do you structure a messy broker packet?

Three steps, in order:

  • Classify. Process each attachment or set it aside as reference. When in doubt, process rather than discard.
  • Extract. Per format, with the source recorded.
  • Consolidate. Merge the same field into one view, keep every conflicting value with its origin, and declare absent fields missing rather than inventing one.
KPIs

What is submission-to-bind efficiency?

The effort and elapsed work between a submission arriving and a risk binding, and the share of submissions that make it. Intake quality drives it: underwriters prioritise faster when every submission arrives structured and legible.

KPIs

What is a quote-to-bind ratio?

The share of quotes released that convert to bound business. A low ratio usually means quoting the wrong risks or quoting late, and both trace back to intake: what got prioritised, what the data actually said, how much time was left.

Trust

What does explainable underwriting AI look like?

The AI structures the submission; it never accepts or declines a risk. Explainable means:

  • Every value carries its source. The file, the sheet, the location, the extraction reasoning.
  • Conflicts show both values. With the selection rationale written down and tagged as AI-selected.
  • Missing fields say Not Found. Never an invented number.

This is how Brisc’s Submissions Analyst works. The product detail lives at submission intake for underwriting teams, including source traceability on every extracted value.

“The beauty of Brisc was taking about 80% of the manual labour away, so people can focus on underwriting instead of data entry.”
Nik Lucking, Managing Partner, Helix Underwriting Partners
Common questions

Submission intake, answered

How do underwriting teams handle messy broker packets today?

Mostly by re-keying. An underwriter or assistant opens each attachment, hunts for the fields that matter, and types them into the workbench. It works at low volume, but it consumes underwriting hours on data entry and leaves no record of where each value came from.

What happens when two documents in the packet disagree?

A disciplined intake process keeps both values with their origins, selects the most credible with a written rationale, and never overwrites the original. The underwriter sees the conflict and the reasoning instead of a single number of unknown provenance.

What should intake do with loss runs?

Loss runs are best recognised and set aside as reference documents for the underwriter, not flattened into fields. The same goes for risk-engineering reports. Intake’s job is to structure the submission and route supporting documents to the right reader intact.

Does AI-based intake decide whether to quote?

It shouldn’t, and Brisc’s doesn’t. Intake structures the submission: it reconciles conflicting sources and prioritises the most credible. Appetite, eligibility and the quote decision stay with the underwriter, which is exactly why the evidence trail matters.

What fields should submission intake capture?

The insured and address, broker and brokerage, quote deadline and inception, TIV and BI, program limit, layers and attachments, and the perils with their sublimits and deductibles. Just as important: every expected field that is absent should be declared missing, not invented.

Bring your messiest packet. Watch it structure.

30 minutes, no slide deck, your real files: a bordereau, a statement, a submission. Your business is specific; the walkthrough should be too.

Book the walkthrough