The words, as this market uses them

Glossary

Submission ingestion

The automated intake of broker submissions across email, PDF, Excel, ACORD, MRC and scans, and their conversion into structured, validated data for underwriting.

Submission intelligence

Enrichment of a submission with risk information the documents never carried: hazard exposure at the location, whether the declared value is credible, and whatever the public record says about who is actually in the building. Delivered at submission time rather than at survey.

Broker submission

The pack of documents a broker sends an underwriter to request a quote: typically a cover email, slip or MRC, schedules of values, loss runs and supporting reports.

MRC (Market Reform Contract)

The London Market’s standard placing document, structuring risk details, conditions and information into defined sections. Central to Lloyd’s placements.

ACORD forms

Standardised insurance data forms widely used in the US market for applications and submissions, published by the ACORD standards body.

Schedule of values (SOV)

A line-by-line listing of insured locations with attributes such as address, occupancy, construction, year built, square footage and insured values.

TIV (Total Insured Value)

The total value insured under a policy, in property typically split across property damage and business interruption components.

Business interruption (BI)

Cover for loss of income and increased costs following insured physical damage; a component of TIV in commercial property.

ITV (Insurance to Value)

The ratio of insured value to actual replacement value. Low ITV indicates underinsurance — a persistent problem where declared values lag rebuild costs.

Valuation adequacy

Whether a declared value credibly reflects reinstatement cost, typically assessed by benchmarking against modelled rebuild cost per square foot.

Underinsurance

Insured values materially below true replacement cost, exposing insureds to shortfalls and average clauses, and insurers to disputes and mispriced risk.

Vacancy risk

The raised fire, water and crime exposure of an unoccupied building. Chronically under-declared, and detectable from imagery, activity and public records.

Submission triage

Prioritising incoming submissions by appetite fit and winnability so underwriters work the most valuable risks first, rather than in inbox order.

Appetite

The classes, geographies, sizes and characteristics of risk an insurer wants to write, often codified in rules used for triage and referral.

Enrichment

Augmenting extracted submission data with external information, per location or per risk. In SnapLine this is Atlas, which is licensed separately.

Confidence score

A per-field measure of extraction certainty, letting underwriters see which values to trust and which to verify.

Document classification

Automatically identifying each document’s type within a submission pack, so that the right extraction applies to a slip, a schedule, a loss run or a report.

Cross-document validation

Reconciling values across a submission’s documents (slip vs schedule vs email) and flagging conflicts instead of silently choosing.

IDP (Intelligent Document Processing)

Horizontal software for automating document-heavy workflows across industries. Contrast with vertical submission ingestion built for insurance semantics.

OCR (Optical Character Recognition)

Technology converting document images into machine-readable text. A component of ingestion. Working out what those characters mean to an underwriter is a separate problem.

Headless deployment

Running a platform via API without its user interface. Documents in, structured data out, feeding downstream systems directly.

Underwriting workbench

The working environment where underwriters manage submissions, referrals and decisions; a common downstream integration target for ingestion output.

Bordereau (pl. bordereaux)

Periodic reports of risks, premiums or claims passed between coverholders/MGAs and capacity providers in delegated authority business.

Bordereaux reconciliation

Checking a coverholder’s return against the binder it was written under, rather than only against the previous month’s return: classes, territories, periods of attachment, limits and premium basis, with whatever disagrees raised as an exception.

Delegated authority

An arrangement where a carrier grants an MGA or coverholder authority to bind risks on its behalf within agreed parameters.

MGA (Managing General Agent)

An intermediary with delegated underwriting authority from one or more capacity providers, operating with carrier-like underwriting discipline at intermediary scale.

Loss run

A report of an insured’s historical claims, used to assess loss experience; frequently arrives as scanned or semi-structured documents.

Quote-ready

The state in which a submission’s data is complete, validated and enriched enough for an underwriter to price without further data assembly.

Proof of Value (PoV)

A fixed-scope evaluation. In SnapLine’s case, twenty live submissions processed with a written accuracy and fit report, agreed in writing before it starts.