(Image credit: IIR.)

Duck Creek Technologies (Boston) is bringing its underwriting-to-core proposition to ITC Vegas this week, using the industry gathering to make the case that the next stage of underwriting modernization requires a closer connection between underwriters’ working environment and the core systems that ultimately execute insurance transactions.

The vendor is demonstrating the combined capabilities of Duck Creek and Send Technology, the London-based underwriting orchestration provider it acquired in July. Duck Creek is also using several ITC sessions to discuss the convergence of underwriting, core systems, orchestration and agentic AI.

The vendor seeks to evangelize an architectural proposition that became central to its strategy with the acquisition of Send: modern underwriting technology and modern core systems have largely evolved along parallel tracks, and bringing them together could eliminate some of the duplication and fragmentation created as insurers modernized each separately.

Duck Creek characterizes the resulting platform as “underwriting-to-core.”

The phrase reflects a systems evolution in which underwriting workbenches emerged in response to limitations of conventional policy administration systems. Core platforms became increasingly effective at defining products, rating risks, processing transactions and administering policies, but complex commercial and specialty underwriters perform work extending well beyond those functions.

They ingest submissions and documents, gather third-party data, assess appetite, compare exposures, model risks, collaborate on referrals and negotiate terms. Underwriting workbenches and orchestration platforms arose to bring those activities together rather than forcing underwriters to navigate a collection of disconnected applications.

As Hardeep Gulati, CEO, Duck Creek, told IIR in an earlier conversation, “Core systems met the promise of efficiency in policy, billing and claims, but they did not meet the promise of improving underwriting.”

Connecting Two Layers of Insurance Technology

The success of underwriting workbenches has created another architectural question: how much insurance logic should exist separately from the core?

Product definitions, rating information, underwriting rules and authoritative policy transactions ultimately reside in or interact with core systems. An underwriting platform operating above that environment therefore needs to exchange information continually with systems of record—and, in some implementations, insurers can find themselves recreating definitions and rules in multiple places.

That is the problem Duck Creek believes the Send acquisition can address.

Gulati told IIR following the acquisition that insurers require “a very deep integration on every aspect of underwriting.” The goal is not simply to pass data between Send and Duck Creek Policy, but to allow the underwriting environment to draw more directly on the product definitions, transactions and other insurance logic residing in the core.

Send approaches the same problem from the opposite direction.

“We’ve spent the last five years talking to people in the industry who were asking, ‘How can you take underwriting closer to the core system?’” Andy Moss, Co-Founder, Send, and now General Manager of Underwriting, Duck Creek, told IIR in July.

Duck Creek came from the core toward underwriting; Send came from underwriting toward the core.

That convergence helps explain why the acquisition is more consequential than simply expanding Duck Creek’s product portfolio. The two technologies occupy different but increasingly interdependent layers of the insurance operating model.

A Foundation for Agentic AI

The connection also matters to Duck Creek’s agentic AI strategy.

AI applied to isolated underwriting tasks can create value without fundamentally changing the relationship between underwriting and core systems. But as AI begins to participate more directly in workflows and decisions, the connection to governed product logic, data and transactions becomes more important.

Duck Creek is positioning underwriting-to-core as part of that foundation: an environment in which underwriting orchestration, core systems and AI can operate more closely together rather than as separate technology layers.

From Modernized Core to Orchestrated Carrier

At ITC, Duck Creek is extending the discussion beyond underwriting through the idea of what it calls the “orchestrated carrier”—an insurer that builds on core modernization by increasingly connecting workflows, data, automation and decision-making across the enterprise.

That framing points to a significant change in what modernization can mean. Replacing a legacy policy administration system was once itself a major strategic destination. Cloud-based core platforms make continuing change easier, but they do not automatically eliminate the operational layers that have accumulated around underwriting and other insurance functions.

Underwriting-to-core represents one attempt to address that next problem: preserving the specialized environment underwriters need without allowing it to become another technological island.

Moss described the potential of combining the two platforms to IIR in July as a “great force multiplier.”

Duck Creek will have to demonstrate what that multiplier looks like in production as the Send integration develops. Send continues to operate as a standalone underwriting platform capable of integrating with other core systems, while Duck Creek is building a deeper integration for customers using the two technologies together.

For now, Duck Creek’s ITC presence signals that underwriting-to-core is moving from the rationale behind an acquisition to a proposition the company intends to promote as an important part of its vision for insurance technology.

The underlying question is broader than Duck Creek and Send: after years of modernizing the core and adding sophisticated technology around it, how much more value can insurers create by reconnecting those layers?

Duck Creek’s Send Acquisition Connects Underwriting to Core