Last week, Google Cloud and The Travelers Companies Inc. announced they are working together to create a cloud-based data ecosystem that will quickly synthesize vast amounts of information, helping Travelers' underwriters evaluate risks for large and middle market businesses.

The data ecosystem, built on Google Cloud, will integrate millions of structured and unstructured data points from multiple sources—internal and external—and leverage artificial intelligence and advanced analytics to give underwriters a clearer picture of a prospective account's risk profile to accelerate the quoting process for agents and customers, a press release said.

"Insurance companies are rich with proprietary data, but there's an abundance of new and developing third-party data that's becoming increasingly valuable to underwriters," said Henna Karna, managing director, Global Insurance, Reinsurance & Risk Management Industry Solutions, Google Cloud.

"Our ultimate goal is to empower the insurance industry with cloud-based capabilities that connect those dots and provide a complete view of risk," Karna said. “Travelers is an industry leader known for underwriting excellence and innovation, and together, we're working to further scale its advanced analytics and unlock additional data-driven insights."

The move is not Google's first foray into the insurance space. In 2018, Applied Systems announced a nine-figure minority investment from CapitalG, the growth equity investment fund of Google parent company Alphabet Inc. And in 2021, Google announced it was teaming up with two global insurers, Allianz Global Corporate and Specialty (AGCS) and Munich Re, to launch the Risk Protection Program, a partnership that will offer cyber insurance coverage to Google Cloud customers and reduce cybersecurity risks.

However, the partnership's focus on large and middle market businesses is new. In many ways, the commercial lines submissions process has been in the midst of an evolutionary growth spurt. But for the time being, that has been limited to quoting small commercial business with various InsurTech platforms, most notably Vertafore and Applied Systems, providing greater connectivity to commercial quoting.

Importantly, early pilot results from the Google-Travelers partnership have demonstrated that leveraging Google Cloud's data and analytics tools can reduce the time to complete an underwriting file for a commercial insurance quote for a large or middle market business to just minutes, substantially shortening the time from submission to quote, according to a press release.

"We have made great strides in recent years to improve and simplify the underwriting experience for our customers, agents and employees," said Greg Toczydlowski, executive vice president and president of business insurance at Travelers. "Google Cloud's world-class data science capabilities will significantly enhance our efforts and provide us with an even more granular understanding of the risks we're evaluating at a faster pace."

Will Jones is IA editor-in-chief.