insurance underwriter

Someone at your church or office always seems to size people up before agreeing to anything. Lend money to that one, and you will not see it again. Trust that other one with your car, and he will bring it back cleaner than he took it. Every experienced person does this kind of calm sizing up, and an insurance underwriter simply does it as a job, with numbers to back the instinct.

When you apply for a life insurance policy or a car insurance policy in Nigeria, someone behind the scenes looks at your age, your health history, your occupation, the car you drive, even where you live in Lagos, and decides two things. Should the company accept this risk at all, and if so, what premium makes it worth accepting.

A young banker in Lagos applying for life cover might get a lower premium than a motorcycle courier of the same age, because the underwriter has looked at the danger each job carries. In the United Kingdom, a homeowner in an area that has flooded twice in ten years will likely pay more for home insurance than a neighbour on higher ground, and an underwriter is the one who worked that out from flood data.

For someone abroad sending money home to insure a parent's health or a family property in Nigeria, the underwriter is the invisible hand that decided what that policy costs and what it actually covers. It can feel unfair when a premium seems high, but the underwriter's job is to keep the whole pool of policyholders fair to each other, more than fair to you.

Underwriters lean heavily on the work of actuaries, who supply the statistics on how often things go wrong and how badly. The underwriter then applies judgement on top of the numbers, because two people with identical statistics on paper can still carry different real world risk.