How Amwins Transformed Group Benefits Underwriting with AI-Powered Document Extraction

Amwins is the largest wholesale distributor of specialty insurance products and services in the U.S.Amwins has expertise across a diversified mix of property, casualty, group benefits and reinsurance products. We also offer value-added services to support these products, including product development, underwriting, premium and claims administration and actuarial services.

Amwins serves as benefits program manager for one of the largest Professional Employment Organizations (PEOs) in the United States, generating over 8,000 SMB group medical insurance quotes annually. A core feature of our underwriting process is providing detailed, defensible "apples-to-apples" pricing comparisons between a group'scurrent medical coverage and our proposed replacement coverage. For years, this critical capability relied on a manual, time-intensive process: underwriting staff reviewing PDF carrier and TPA invoice documents and manually copying subscriber details into our census tools. This reconciliation step consumed 15-30% of total quote time—anywhere from 20 minutes to 2 hours per quote, depending on group size and complexity. With quote volume increasing 30% year-over-year and no corresponding headcount growth, this bottleneck was becoming unsustainable.

Upstage.ai's Information Extraction was the first solution that felt like it had cracked the code on reliable schema extraction from highly variable document sources.The difference? Their document-centric LLM with integrated OCR handled edge cases and novel invoice structures with minimal prompt tuning—better than anything we'd evaluated over several years of searching.Our implementation approach was straightforward:1. Defined our target schema with inline descriptive prompts2. Let the model do the heavy lifting3. Minimal tuning during evaluation yielded 90%+ success rates with 100% accuracy on our test setThe ease of integration into our Azure/M365 platform meant we built and deployed a full MVP in under a month.

Production metrics speak for themselves:

• 1,100+ invoices processed in the first month
  
• 200+ invoices processed daily by our team of 18 underwriters
  
• Processing time reduced from 20 minutes-2 hours to under 5 minutes
  
• 1.5 FTE worth of capacity reclaimed per week across the team
  
• 3-month payback period on build costs
  
• 80+ unique carrier invoice formats successfully processed (and counting)

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The efficiency gains enabled us to:

• Meet SLA commitments without headcount growth
  
• Absorb 30% YoY volume increases with existing team capacity
  
• Deliver faster quote turnaround to our PEO client
  
• Redeploy underwriter time to higher-value activities

What’s next for you?

If your operations are held back by manual processes or unstructured data, Upstage can help. Let’s explore how we can create a solution tailored to your needs. Get in touch today.

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