Underwriting Editing and Proofreading Services

Three years on, a portfolio is losing money and somebody is going through the files to find out why. Four hundred risks were written at terms nobody can now reconstruct. The referral notes say "acceptable — MD approved", "as expiry", and "relationship account". The underwriter who wrote them has left, and there is no way to tell a good decision from a bad one.

We edit what underwriting functions produce — file notes and rationales for accepted, rated and declined risks, referral submissions and their responses, underwriting guidance and appetite statements, policy wording endorsements and their explanations, renewal and remedial action correspondence, audit and peer review documentation, and the material used to brief brokers on what a market will write. Our editors work on notes that have to be intelligible to a stranger.

The underwriting rationale is the record that makes a portfolio reviewable, and its failure is a decision recorded without the thinking that produced it. A file that cannot be understood by the next person is a file that teaches nobody anything. We work through these so the rationale names the features that drove the decision rather than describing the risk, since a summary of the submission is already in the submission and the note's job is to say what mattered; so the price is explained against the model or the benchmark, with the reason for any departure, because an underwriter's judgement is valuable and undocumented judgement is indistinguishable from carelessness; so the concerns are recorded alongside the reasons for writing it anyway, given that a risk accepted with two stated reservations is a decision and one accepted silently is a guess; so the terms imposed are tied to the concerns they address, as an excess or a warranty that exists for a reason should say which; so what would change the view at renewal is written down, since this is the single most useful sentence for whoever holds the file next year; so a decline records what would have made it acceptable, because brokers return and the market's memory should not depend on one person; so anything relied on that was not verified is flagged; and so the note is written to be read by an auditor, a successor and a reinsurer. Files kept this way let a portfolio be managed.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including submissions, pricing, portfolio data and audit material. We are editors rather than underwriters, actuaries or regulators, and we offer no view on risk selection, pricing or any decision. What we can do is make the reasoning survive the underwriter.