(Photo credit: R. Jason Brunson, U.S. Navy.)

Verisk Insurance Solutions (Jersey City, N.J.) has released Verisk Commercial Auto Prefill, which the vendor characterizes as streamlining the commercial auto pricing and underwriting process statement. Through input of a business name and address, Commercial Auto Prefill promptly provides information on the vehicles registered to the business or businessowner at the address provided, Verisk reports. The new tool complements the vendor’s existing commercial property and businessowners policy prefill capabilities.

The new capability aims at reducing manual data entry, which Verisk notes continues is continues to be a large source of cost and potentially a substantial contributing factor to data errors in the insurance application process for the commercial auto insurance industry. The vendor estimates that for each commercial auto insurer, processing applications could require almost 4 million keystrokes per year, with approximately more than 50 percent of those keystrokes dedicated to entering vehicle identification numbers (VINs).

“Easy access to current and accurate information for a commercial auto insurance application is vitally important for underwriting and pricing,” comments Neil Spector, president of Verisk Insurance Solutions’ underwriting division. “The amount of time underwriters and agents spend manually entering vehicle schedule information can be overwhelming and potentially lead to incorrect information inputted at time of quote or when underwriting the risk. Commercial Auto Prefill helps avoid that costly, time-intensive process while offering more accurate information.”

Verisk’s Commercial Auto Prefill provides vehicle attributes including year, make, model, new cost, and registered owner. The agent or underwriter then choose which vehicles should be included on the quote or policy, according to the vendor’s description of the process enabled by the new capabilities.