Automated underwriting

Since June 1, 2022, France's Lemoine Act of February 28, 2022 has removed the health questionnaire in mortgage protection insurance for home loans when the insured share of the cumulative outstanding loan stays below 200,000 euros per person and the loan ends before the borrower turns 60. Above that threshold, medical underwriting remains, and it goes through a machine first. Automated underwriting means an acceptance, decline or pricing decision made with no human involvement by an engine that applies the insurer's underwriting rules to the applicant's answers and, where relevant, to external data. It dominates personal and mass lines: motor, home, package policies for very small businesses, mortgage protection, individual protection cover. Everything turns on referral. Each rule sorts the case into standard acceptance, acceptance with a loading or a predefined exclusion, or exception, and the exception goes to an underwriter, or to the chief medical officer in life and mortgage protection, with the reasons for the referral attached. The straight-through acceptance rate then becomes a steering metric that an underwriting department watches as closely as the loss ratio. French law sets a limit that questionnaire designers forget: since the ruling of the mixed chamber of the Cour de cassation of February 7, 2014, an insurer can only allege misrepresentation on answers to questions it actually asked, which makes the coded questionnaire the only document it can rely on. A badly written rule repeats itself thousands of times before an underwriter notices it. The concept differs from the algorithmic following syndicate, specific to the London market, where a portfolio takes lines on risks led by another underwriter, and from submission triage, which ranks broker submissions in commercial lines without accepting them.