Commercial Underwriter

Role overview

The client is an underwriting management agency writing commercial short-term insurance business through a broker distribution network.

ACG Growth Partners™ is recruiting a Commercial Underwriter on behalf of this business. The appointment underwrites new commercial risks within the company’s risk appetite and internal mandates, and carries responsibility for how a broker portfolio performs rather than for processing alone.

The brief is genuinely two-sided. Alongside the technical underwriting sits real broker-facing work: advising on the product range, training brokers on it, and feeding what the market is doing back into the product itself.

Key responsibilities

Underwriting and mandate

• Underwrite new commercial risks.
• Ensure that risks are written within the company’s risk appetite.
• Adhere to reinsurance treaties and internal mandates.

Portfolio performance

• Monitor badly performing risks and take corrective action on them.
• Maintain an acceptable loss ratio within a broker portfolio.

Product

• Maintain policy wording drafts and ensure the product remains competitive with the market offering.
• Provide input into building and designing various aspects of the products on a designated system.
• Provide comparisons between competitors’ products and the company’s own commercial products.

Broker service and relationships

• Deal with day-to-day queries and amendments to existing policies.
• Advise brokers on the current product offering.
• Maintain and build good relationships with brokers.
• Conduct product training for brokers.

Minimum requirements

• Five years of commercial underwriting experience.
• Experience working with commercial insurance products.
• A proven underwriting track record, including assessing exposure and underwriting within agreed mandates.
• NQF Level 4: Short-Term Commercial Lines, 60 credits.
• The RE5 Examination Level 1 successfully completed.
• Very good written and verbal communication.

Skills and competencies

• Policy, product and systems knowledge.
• Negotiating skills.
• Problem solving and analysis.
• Numeric skills.
• Strong interpersonal skills and the ability to build relationships.
• A customer service orientation.

Personal attributes

The successful candidate will work well under pressure and be detail orientated, with the judgement to hold a line on mandate while still being someone brokers want to deal with. Underwriting decisions here are visible in the portfolio’s loss ratio, so this suits somebody who takes ownership of that number rather than treating each risk in isolation.

Who this suits

This role will suit an experienced commercial underwriter who wants portfolio ownership and a broker-facing brief, including product input and training, rather than a narrow processing role inside a larger underwriting team.