Technology continues to gain traction in the commercial insurance sector after revolutionizing personal lines insurance by allowing consumers to bind auto and home coverages online with no broker assistance.

Risk managers, brokers and insurers are increasingly using technological tools in insurance procurement and risk transfer, binding contracts, exchanging information more freely, saving time and reducing manual labor.

While the cost and time involved with technology adoption can be challenging, they can be seen as investments that will pay dividends going forward, sources said. 

Christie Weinstein, Morris Plains, New Jersey-based director of risk management and insurance for Honeywell Inc. and a Risk & Insurance Management Society Inc. board director, said, “The use of technology in the risk management department at Honeywell has grown significantly over the past four years.” 

Risk managers, though, must sometimes cobble together different technologies and tools to achieve a solution, often using application programming interfaces, or APIs, said Audrey Rampinelli, New York-based senior vice president of risk management and insurance services at Mastercard Inc., who has consulted on insurtech projects. APIs essentially allow different software applications to communicate. 

“There are so many tools and so many platforms you can leverage,” so APIs are useful and sometimes necessary to consolidate and use the different platforms to meet the specific needs of an organization, Ms. Rampinelli said.

Vetting the myriad systems available requires time and self-education for risk managers, Ms. Rampinelli said. “You have to invest time in the process, you have to do your due diligence. That investment is well worth the time,” she said. 

NFP Corp. advises clients on data frameworks and architecture to help facilitate future interconnectivity and reduce repeated extraction and re-entry of data, said Chris Greene, Toronto-based vice president for strategy, analytics and knowledge in the broker’s construction and infrastructure North America group.

“In a perfect world, we won’t need to extract data because if the risk manager and the company are set up with proper data architecture and framework, information addressing their exposure already present in the system can flow right into the underwriting model,” Mr. Greene said. 

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Gaurav Kapoor, Toronto-based senior vice president, head of strategy, digital, in the NFP group, added, “In general, we are seeing technology and using technology much more than we were two or five years ago.” 

A client of Risk Placement Services Inc. recently saved $2 million in premium through technology, said Ryan Collier, Chicago-based chief digital officer for the wholesaler. 

The client made its property schedule more exact and accurate using a free online application combined with small, inexpensive geo-location devices called eggs, which were placed on each roof of a property or asset, providing precise longitude and latitude locations. The information was then fed into a digital format similar to a spreadsheet, he said. 

“For a risk manager to be able to save $2 million on insurance solely by getting their schedule accurate, that shows there’s a lot of opportunity for better communications tools in the future,” Mr. Collier said.

Similarly, a client with an incomplete or inaccurate property schedule can have it updated and made more accurate by feeding it into an RPS system, which populates data fields by pulling information, such as square footage or construction date, from third-party data sources, he said. 

More complete and precise submissions are more likely to get to “the top of the pile” on the desk of an underwriter inundated with submissions in the challenging commercial insurance market, Mr. Collier said.

In January, Honeywell implemented a new risk management information system for its property assets that helps facilitate the submission process by allowing underwriters access to information, including model-ready reports, Ms. Weinstein said.

The system also allows her to track which brokers, insurers and other business partners have downloaded the information and when, helping her track the progress of submissions.

The system is “a great data application tool” that helps navigate challenging commercial property insurance markets, Ms. Weinstein said.

“Tracking data for physical assets becomes much harder” in the difficult market, especially as companies have reduced staff, she said, adding, “The time invested and the money invested have definitely been worthwhile.” 

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With each business unit within Honeywell responsible for its own expenses, including insurance, “this system gives a lot of visibility into what each individual business’ exposures were,” she said.

Carnell Jones, Chicago-based risk manager for real estate development and management company Trinitas Ventures LLC and president of the Chicago chapter of RIMS, said he is evaluating risk management technology tools as part of his current role, which he took on six months ago.

One platform he investigated “is the sort of tool which can help streamline the application process and also eliminate redundancies,” Mr. Jones said. The tool aggregates submission questions and related information digitally in a single place and can loop in other departments to answer questions and then track the progress of the process.

The platform stores previous years’ submissions, allowing for greater consistency from year to year, and can provide specific breakdowns by insurer and broker, such as total spending with a particular counterparty. 

The platform has also served as a training tool for Mr. Jones in his new role, providing insights into the organization’s historical insurance needs and past decisions. 

In addition to learning about new technologies and how they may help improve risk management, risk managers have been learning from each other when it comes to technology, Mr. Jones said, adding he uses the RIMS community to learn more about different systems. “I get a lot of good feedback from their experience,” he said.

Honeywell’s Ms. Weinstein said risk managers also communicate with each other to vet the myriad systems available to them. “This is a major topic of conversation” in RIMS’s online forum and elsewhere as risk managers increasingly adopt technology while using one another’s experience to help sift through their options, she said.