Four tools, one quote: unifying underwriting into a single workbench.

Commercial underwriting is the business of deciding whether to insure a risk and at what price. The underwriter gathers the facts about a client, models the exposure, structures the coverage, and issues a quote. The workbench is where all of that happens.

When Allianz restructured its commercial insurance business, it brought mid corporate and large corporate under one strategy called Allianz Commercial. That created the need for one unified workbench. Across regional markets such as North America, Germany and France, underwriters relied on different tools, each pulling from multiple sources, which delayed getting quotes out to customers.

The same job is done by very different people, on very different clocks. That mismatch, and the tool sprawl underneath it, is the whole design problem. It runs across property, liability, marine, engineering and aviation lines of business.

The existing setup used separate systems for different tasks, with slow and dated interfaces. It worked, but the seams between the tools were where time and accuracy leaked away.

Too many touchpoints. Switching between systems like Cores and Union made retrieving data and making decisions cumbersome.
Slow, dated interfaces. Many tools had old UIs that hurt both speed and accuracy in risk assessment.
No system integration. Data from financial reports, client details and risk models was not consolidated, so underwriters collected and verified it by hand.
Manual data gathering. The single biggest time sink sat before pricing even began.

The giveaway: underwriters kept their own spreadsheets to stitch the picture together. A workbench you have to leave to finish the job is not a workbench. That pointed at three motivators for the new build: efficiency and speed, real-time data access, and better usability.

The brief came down to one bet: if the whole submission lives in one place, the tool-switching and manual gathering that slowed quotes simply goes away. Everything else followed from that.

After the design stage an in-house team took the product forward, so post-launch metrics sit with them.

I joined as a Senior UX Designer and worked across the full arc of the design: research, user flows, wireframes, visual design and user testing. I sat close to the product owners and underwriters throughout, and prepared the designs so the development team could build them cleanly.

The design team was a UX lead setting direction, me as a Senior UX Designer, and a second senior UX designer. We worked with product owners, underwriters, and the dev team. Delivery was agile: the design team took a two-week head start each cycle while developers set up the system, so validated designs were always ready ahead of the build.

We ran calls with five underwriters and two product owners to hear the challenges they faced and to watch how they actually used the existing tools. Three insights shaped everything after.

Framed honestly: these are qualitative insights from a small, expert group, treated as design direction rather than statistically measured research. They were enough to point the redesign in a clear direction and to keep us anchored to real underwriting practice.

We validated low-fidelity skeletons with underwriters and product owners before committing to visual design. Working in grey kept the conversation on structure and priority, not colour, and let us move fast between rounds.

We worked in a tight loop, repeated each sprint: understand the problem space, define the flows, then design the visuals, with hygiene checks along the way. The design team stayed two weeks ahead of the build.

The interface runs on a small, consistent kit: an Allianz navy anchor, one accent blue, a quiet neutral canvas, and a clear red, amber, green scale for status. Generous spacing and soft cards keep a dense, data-heavy tool feeling calm. Every status pairs a colour with an icon and a worded label, so it reads correctly at a glance and for anyone who sees colour differently.

Building blocks were a tight set reused everywhere: KPI tiles, data tables, status badges, form fields, steppers, segmented controls, progress bars and side rails. Inter throughout, a tight scale from large display numbers on KPIs down to dense table text tuned for scanning.

The old tools had no home. The workbench opens on a dashboard that answers the underwriter's first questions before they touch a control: what is on my plate, what is due, and what needs my attention right now.

The first flow we built. An underwriter registers a new submission for a client. What was a long, flat form across systems becomes a guided, sectioned flow with a clear stepper and a live summary. This is the screen that most directly answers the research: the manual gathering that used to sit here is designed out.

The second flow lets underwriters create and compare alternatives, then manage coverages, extensions and exclusions. Options that used to be compared in spreadsheets now sit side by side in the workbench, with the numbers carried through.

Large corporate risks are placed in layers, each with its own limit, attachment point and share. The workbench turns that abstraction into a tower you can read: how the programme stacks up, and how much of each layer Allianz keeps versus cedes to reinsurance.

When a layer carries too much catastrophe exposure, the underwriter cedes part of it to reinsurers. That used to mean another system. Here it is a clear panel: define a reinsurance segment, choose the perils ceded, and place shares with a panel of reinsurers.

At the portfolio level, a catastrophe view shows how much of each peril zone is used against its capacity, so a team lead can see where the book is getting crowded before binding the next large risk.

We delivered the MVP of the unified workbench, bringing a patchwork of regional tools into one workspace designed to cut the tool-switching and manual data gathering that slowed quotes.