Return commercial underwriters to risk judgment by eliminating the data-assembly work that shouldn’t require their expertise.
Owen Carmichael spent seven years underwriting commercial lines at a regional carrier in New York. For the first few months, the job felt like what it was supposed to be: analyzing risk, making coverage decisions, pricing accounts. Then the reality of modern commercial underwriting set in.
The actual work — maybe 40% of each day — was risk judgment. The rest was retrieval. Pulling property data. Checking business registrations. Verifying NAICS codes against what the application said. Looking up flood zone exposure. Cross-referencing loss history. Building the picture that made the judgment possible.
Owen started tracking it. On a typical commercial P&C submission, he was spending 55 to 70 percent of his time assembling data, not evaluating it. He wasn’t unusual. His team looked the same. The underwriters with the best judgment were spending the smallest fraction of their day applying it.
Owen left the carrier in 2023 and connected with Ingrid Solano, who had spent four years as a data engineering lead at Verisk Analytics building pipeline infrastructure for P&C analytics products. She had seen the same problem from the supply side: carriers weren’t under-served on data availability. They were under-served on data assembly. The raw material existed. The workflow to get it to underwriters in a usable form before they opened a file did not.
They built a prototype dossier tool together. The first version connected to six data sources and produced a one-page structured summary for a single class of business. Owen took it back to a former colleague at a mid-size carrier and asked them to run a live submission through it. The carrier reduced turnaround on that class by four days in the first month.
Perilarc is now a full commercial P&C underwriting intelligence platform. The assembly engine connects to 40+ data sources — peril exposure maps, property records, business intelligence feeds, loss history databases — and delivers a carrier-formatted risk dossier in under 90 seconds per submission. A carrier-configurable scoring layer applies your appetite rules and produces an initial coverage recommendation and rate indication. Submissions that clear your confidence threshold route to a bind queue. Complex risks go to underwriter review with all data pre-assembled — judgment work only.
The carriers using Perilarc today are mid-size commercial P&C writers who wanted to compete on submission speed without hiring more underwriters. They serve the mid-market commercial segment where brokers route business based on who responds first with a quality answer. With Perilarc, same-day decisions on clean risks are operationally achievable — not as an exception, but as a workflow standard.
Return commercial underwriters to risk judgment by eliminating the data-assembly work that shouldn’t require their expertise.
That’s it. We don’t think AI should replace underwriters. We think AI should handle the retrievable, structured, deterministic work so that underwriters can focus on the irreplaceable work: judgment under uncertainty, relationship knowledge, class-of-business expertise that no model captures.
More data sources do not produce better underwriting if the data arrives without source attribution and confidence scoring. Every field in a Perilarc dossier tells you where it came from.
The system should optimize around preserving that resource. Every hour spent on data assembly is an hour not spent on the decisions that actually require expertise.
Regulators, reinsurers, and senior management can ask how a coverage decision was reached. The answer must trace back through data, scores, and rules — not a black box.
Appetite is not industry-standard. Every carrier’s scoring model reflects their specific class experience, geographic footprint, and risk tolerance. Generic models produce generic outcomes.
Same-day decisions are only valuable if they are as defensible as the 10-day decisions they replace. Perilarc is built so that faster never means less thorough.
See how Perilarc fits into your existing commercial lines workflow. No rip-and-replace required.