One Vision and Operational System for a United Future
Uniting a fractured operational system to a single, seamless source of truth for Chubb's key employee — the Underwriter.
About the Project
The Promise: Uniting a fractured operational system to a single, seamless source of truth for Chubb's key employee — the Underwriter.
The Outcome: A unified digital platform vision and service design blueprint that projected ~$2B in operational savings by streamlining underwriting workflows across 54 countries.
The Project: A comprehensive EX Service Design engagement to redesign commercial underwriting tools and processes at Chubb — the world's largest publicly traded property and casualty insurance company.
The Client: Chubb, via Idea Couture (now Cognizant). The engagement brought together strategy, research, and design to tackle systemic fragmentation across Chubb's global underwriting operations.
The Problem
- Fragmented Systems: 54 countries running independent, disconnected underwriting platforms with no unified workflow.
- Inefficient Processes: Underwriters spending excessive time on manual data entry, duplicate work, and navigating between siloed tools
- Lost Institutional Knowledge: Critical underwriting expertise trapped in individual systems and tribal knowledge, inaccessible to the broader organization.
The Impact
- One Global Platform: A single, unified underwriting system replacing 50+ fragmented tools across all regions.
- Streamlined Workflows: Automated data flows and intelligent routing reduced manual effort by an estimated 40%, freeing underwriters to focus on complex risk assessment.
- Knowledge Sharing at Scale: Centralized insights and best practices accessible across all markets, enabling faster onboarding and better-informed decisions.
The Challenge
How can we transform commercial underwriting from a fragmented, regionally siloed operation into a unified, intelligent global platform that empowers every underwriter to work smarter?
Key questions that guided our approach:
- How do underwriters across 54 countries currently navigate their daily workflows — and where are the biggest friction points?
- What does the ideal underwriting experience look like when we remove system constraints and organizational silos?
- How can we design a platform that balances global consistency with the local flexibility that different markets require?
Team, Timeline & Role
Role: Experience Strategist & UX Researcher
Timeline: 6 months (2019)
Key deliverables:
- Stakeholder and underwriter interviews across 5 regions
- Current-state journey maps and pain point analysis
- Underwriter persona development (3 archetypes)
- Design thinking workshop facilitation
- Design principles and solution requirements framework
- Future-state service blueprints
- Concept briefs and solution roadmap
- Executive presentation and recommendations
Research Approach
Our research approach combined ethnographic field studies with participatory design methods. We conducted in-depth interviews with underwriters across 5 regions, observed their daily workflows, and mapped current-state journeys to identify systemic pain points.
Using contextual inquiry techniques, we uncovered how underwriters actually work — revealing workarounds, tribal knowledge, and hidden dependencies that wouldn't appear in process documentation alone.
We synthesized our findings into persona profiles, journey maps, and opportunity frameworks that became the foundation for our design principles and solution concepts.
One Experience for All
Principle 1
Integrate disparate tool sets into a single, consistent cross department data repository and reporting system to drive workflow efficiency and speed.
Work Smarter Not Harder
Principle 2
Streamlined steps and focused interoperability can alleviate the burden of users manually making connections that computer systems can handle more effectively.
Custom Fit Solutions
Principle 3
Empower underwriters and teams with intelligent and modular capabilities that allow for easy team collaboration and prioritization, structured by business units and through role based permissions and views.
Simple & Seamless
Principle 4
Encourage platform and process adoption with intuitive and modern solutions and personalized insights so underwriters feel connected, informed and confident in their tools.
Strategic Insights
Principle 5
Leverage proactive and targeted system level insights so underwriting teams can maximize their impact, profitability and success, while reinforcing Chubb's leadership position in the industry.
Solution Requirements
Seven core requirements emerged from our research to guide platform design
Efficiency
"Streamline workflows to eliminate redundant steps and reduce time-to-quote by automating data capture and routing.
Access to Knowledge
"Centralize institutional knowledge, underwriting guidelines, and historical data so every underwriter can make informed decisions.
System Intelligence
Embed smart defaults, risk scoring, and predictive analytics directly into the workflow to augment underwriter judgment.
Usability
Design intuitive interfaces that minimize training time, reduce errors, and support both novice and expert underwriters.
Personalization
Adapt the experience to individual underwriter preferences, lines of business, and regional requirements.
Flexibility
Support diverse underwriting processes across lines of business and geographies without creating system fragmentation.
Collaboration
Enable seamless communication and handoffs between underwriters, brokers, actuaries, and claims teams.
We Delivered
Over six months, we moved from discovery to a comprehensive service design blueprint that gave Chubb a clear path forward.
We delivered a unified platform vision grounded in real underwriter needs — not assumptions. Our research-driven approach ensured that every recommendation was traceable back to observed behaviors and stated pain points.
The final deliverable included a detailed service blueprint, interaction models, and a phased implementation roadmap that balanced quick wins with long-term transformation goals.
Outputs
- 3 validated underwriter personas
- Current-state journey maps across 5 regions
- 5 design principles adopted by product team
- 7 solution requirement specifications
- 10 concept briefs with prioritization framework
- Future-state service blueprints
- Phased implementation roadmap
- Executive strategy presentation
Impact
- ~$2B in projected operational savings
- Unified platform vision adopted across 54 countries
- 40% estimated reduction in manual underwriting effort
- Design principles embedded into Chubb's product development lifecycle
- Research findings influenced hiring and training strategies
- Blueprint directly informed RFP requirements for technology vendor selection
Challenges & Lessons
Challenges:
- Navigating organizational complexity across 54 countries with different regulatory environments, languages, and underwriting practices
- Balancing stakeholder expectations between global standardization and regional autonomy
- Gaining access to underwriters during peak renewal seasons when time was at a premium
- Synthesizing diverse workflows into coherent personas without oversimplifying regional differences
Lessons Learned:
- Early stakeholder alignment on research goals prevented scope creep and built executive buy-in for the final recommendations
- Participatory design workshops with actual underwriters produced more actionable insights than top-down requirements gathering
- Designing for the most constrained user (new underwriters in complex markets) created a better experience for everyone
- A phased roadmap with visible quick wins was essential for maintaining organizational momentum on a multi-year transformation