Insurance underwriting

Insurance underwriters figure out how risky it is to insure people and businesses. They also decide how much coverage they should receive and how much they should pay for it. Underwriting involves measuring risk exposure and determining the premium with which to insure that risk.

Each insurance company uses its own set of underwriting guidelines in order to determine whether or not the company should accept a proposal. In life insurance this decision process sometimes requires that applicants provide further medical evidence. The underwriters can decide to make a counteroffer in which the premiums have been loaded, or in which various exclusions have been stipulated, which restrict the circumstances under which a claim would be paid. Some companies use automated underwriting systems to encode these rules, and reduce the amount of manual work in processing proposals; some such systems are available from reinsurers.

A leading underwriter is insurance broker Lloyd's of London.