💎 AIB - Executive Series - Why the Soft Market is Making Portfolio Steering a Boardroom Priority — with Simon Fagg

Hey, Fabio here!

In today’s Executive Series, I am joined by Simon Fagg, SVP and Go To Market Leader at IntellectAI. IntellectAI provides AI and data-powered Underwriting and Distribution solutions across Commercial, Specialty and E&S insurance, working with carriers, MGAs and brokers. IntellectAI is the insurance vertical of Intellect Design Arena, a global fintech with solutions for banking and wealth management.

As the P&C market softens, carriers can no longer rely on another line of business or investment returns to compensate for weaker underwriting performance. That is putting greater pressure on underwriting excellence and on leadership’s ability to understand and steer the entire book. 

That raises a bigger question:

How can carriers keep the book aligned with appetite as market conditions change?

Simon explained where the gap between leadership appetite and day-to-day underwriting decisions can emerge, why portfolio steering is moving up the executive agenda, what executives need to see for it to go beyond static reporting, and the dimensions across which carriers can manage the book.

We also explored how AI is beginning to change that equation by making previously inaccessible information easier to use and enabling carriers to understand the underlying drivers of their portfolios at much higher frequency.

Simon will be at ITC Vegas 2026, in case you’re attending and want to continue the conversation in person.

Let’s dive in!

There’s a convergence happening between three things: technology, market events and the softening of the market.

I think that needs to be a wake-up call for everybody.

One of the key questions is how you align your active business-as-usual underwriting teams across different lines of business to the appetite that’s often set at committee level through the C-level in the company.

How do I bring those two things together?
How do I look at the whole book, segment that book of business into appropriate chunks, and make decisions on that data?

To attain competitive advantage in this market, we have to think more about the speed and velocity in which change can be brought through carriers to the market.

Carriers need to be nimble to market events, and there’s a real danger of not having the nimbleness to be not just reactive, but proactive to your entire book of business.

That means being more dynamic about the assessment from a marginal contribution perspective.

When a new quote, submission, policy or renewal comes in, how can I assess that against changing appetite, against my allocation of capital and against the potential future underwriting result?

What makes the market unique right now is that we’re very much in a softening market, and that’s across P&C broadly.

If you look at property, either on the direct side or the reinsurance side on Nat. Cat., we’re seeing double-digit softening in specific rates.

That’s happening across different geographies, not just one particular geography, and cyber is seeing the same sort of impact.

Traditionally, with multi-line business if property was not seeing underwriting returns, Casualty long-tail would provide offset, failing that fallback to investment returns.

But, we have also seen investment returns decrease.
So you can no longer simply rely on one underwriting line or on investment returns to deliver that overall gain.

That brings us back to underwriting excellence.

We need to look not just at individual policies as they come through the door, but at the book of business at different levels of resolution.

For senior leadership, that means understanding the relative profitability of the overall book and how that aligns to the organisation’s appetite, which could be changing at any moment based on market events, opportunities or risk.

One of the key elements is being able to look at the 30,000-foot view: the entire book of business, the specific lines or subsets within it, and then dynamically drill into that data.

I don’t mean simply reporting or traditional static business-intelligence analytics. It is about getting to the underlying drivers based on the organisation’s specific dimensions and metrics, and potentially looking at those at a much higher frequency depending on the line of business.

The important question is how you align the active business-as-usual underwriting teams across different lines of business with the appetite being set at committee and C-level.

When a new quote, submission, policy or renewal comes in, how do I assess that against changing appetite, my allocation of capital and the potential future underwriting result? That is where it starts to become steering rather than simply reporting.

That is going to become even more important and more accessible because of the technology available to us.
AI is one of many technology enablers to get to those specific business outcomes. We have seen a wholesale change in its application over the last six to twelve months.

What AI has enabled is greater accessibility to information that was not previously available in the same way.

It is also enabling a view on that data that we have not seen before, because AI allows us to study anomalies without a defined hypothesis up front, effectively allowing us to surface unknown, unknowns faster at a lower cost.

Portfolio steering is not a static view. It is about looking at a book of business, or a line of business, and having a dynamic perspective on that data.

Carriers can look across different dimensions including capacity, risk appetite, underwriting exposure and rate-on-line, and see very quickly where there are variations or outliers.

From there, you can drill down from the highest possible level to an individual risk at its lowest level of resolution, with all of the appropriate associated drivers of risk, opportunity, profit or loss data.

And it is not just underwriting data. It could include renewal information, endorsements, claims and trusted third-party vendor information, giving you a whole view of an individual submission, quote or policy.

That allows you to manage the book visually on exception.

If, for example, I can see that 70 of my quotes sit in a specific outlier area based on my latest appetite update, I can very quickly ring-fence them and action them either individually or collectively.

That could mean a human-in-the-loop referral, or an agentic workflow triggered off the back of it.

It also allows carriers to deal with increasing submission or renewal volumes without necessarily increasing underwriting headcount, by identifying exceptions and taking actions across a broader range of circumstances or business rules.

The data never being in one place was always a problem. More specifically, it was the accessibility of that fragmented and dispersed data.

Carriers have multiple systems across the organisation that are not joined up. Even when data warehouses were brought together, that did not necessarily mean the data was accessible.

You have policy, submission, claims and exposure data, and the challenge has been extracting that information and bringing all the pieces together in a way that enables insight and decision-making.

If you only have underwriting data but not all of your claims information, or your renewal information or loss history is incomplete, you are still missing part of the picture.

That has traditionally been one of the major challenges in the industry: access to the data and the ability to piece it together to create insight.

Technology has started to change that. It has enabled better and more complete data capture, and more insightful information that can be presented just in time to the person sitting behind the desk, whether that is an underwriter, a claims adjuster or another user.

Cost has always underpinned this as well. But what some of the smaller or older AI models can now achieve at a certain cost point is access to data in a way we have not seen before.

Particularly over the last six to twelve months, that has picked up exponentially.

The takeaway is simple: portfolio steering is becoming less about reporting what happened and more about understanding what is changing across the book - and acting before that change shows up in the results.

In a softening market, that means connecting appetite, exposure, capital and underwriting decisions with much greater frequency. The technology is making that increasingly possible.

The competitive question is how quickly carriers can turn that visibility into action.

Thanks to Simon for joining us and sharing his perspective.

See you on Friday!

Fabio Caravita
Founder, AI Insurer Brief
[email protected]

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