Question 1

What is an agentic underwriting workbench?

Accepted Answer

It is the database of a team's submissions, binds, and claim notices in which each record is built from information extracted from the package materials and verified against them rather than keyed in by hand. Every value carries the document behind it, the team's own workflows key off the record, and the underwriter keeps the final say. Full explanation: https://www.lexcel.ai/journal/what-is-an-agentic-underwriting-workbench/

Question 2

What happens to a field the submission documents do not support?

Accepted Answer

Independent verifying agents confirm or refute each field against the cited source materials, and an unsupported value is withheld or corrected instead of written into the record. The underwriter can also confirm or correct a value directly on the workbench.

Question 3

Does an agentic underwriting workbench replace the underwriter's judgment?

Accepted Answer

No. It produces cited fields and drafts so the underwriter can decide faster. Nothing binds or goes outbound until the underwriter reviews and confirms.

Question 4

Can underwriting and claims run on the same workbench?

Accepted Answer

Yes. Each has its own records, fields, and workflows, and when an underwritten deal becomes a claim the handoff can be set up so nobody rebuilds on the claims side what underwriting already verified.

Question 5

What does an underwriter need in a representations and warranties (R&W) insurance submission?

Accepted Answer

What reliably arrives is the broker's submission email: a deal overview with the basic parameters, plus the confidential information memorandum and financial statements as attachments. The draft purchase agreement and the buyer advisors' diligence reports may or may not come with it, and even a requested retention is sometimes missing, so underwriters routinely quote off a partial package and use the gaps to drive their questions. Format varies widely broker to broker, with some putting every detail in the email body and others attaching a submission document and leaving the email nearly empty.

Question 6

What is a non-binding indication letter in R&W insurance, and how does quoting work?

Accepted Answer

The indication letter sets out indicative terms after a first read of the submission materials: limit, retention, policy period, indicative premium or rate on line, the underwriting fee, and the exclusions already visible. In practice a junior team member or analyst assembles the first draft off a prior precedent or template, the team works through it together with the senior underwriter, and it goes back to the broker before formal underwriting begins. Lexcel works with a team to build the workflow that produces that draft, and the underwriter still sets the terms.

Question 7

How fast can an R&W underwriter turn a quote on a submission?

Accepted Answer

Most of the time today goes to assembly rather than judgment: someone pulls the fields out of the submission, fills a precedent or template, and the team reviews what comes back. That work takes hours per submission and repeats on every deal, which is what makes it expensive, rather than any single step being hard. When the workflow produces the draft instead, assembly time converts to review time, and the underwriter still decides the terms.

Question 8

What happens between the indication letter and binding in R&W insurance?

Accepted Answer

This is the underwriting stage, and practitioners describe it as the most time-intensive part of the process: working the purchase agreement rep by rep and section by section, tax, material contracts, regulatory, then deciding what becomes an exclusion, what becomes a deemed edit, and what is only a follow-up question. Not every flag becomes an exclusion; some get traded, and some get comfort and go away, which is exactly why the work resists a rules engine. Lexcel runs the same passes the team runs, section by section against its own playbook, with each position pointing back to the language behind it, so the underwriter spends the time deciding rather than re-reading.

Question 9

How do R&W underwriters prepare for an underwriting call?

Accepted Answer

The underwriting call is where the underwriter and the deal team work through open items, and preparation is triage under time pressure: the quality of earnings report often lands not long before the call, and few underwriters read a full data room, pulling only what they need. What they build is a short list of high, medium, and low issues worth honing in on. Agenda practice differs sharply by shop, from a two-page outline with questions asked live to a detailed agenda worked line by line, so what helps is a cited list of issues to react to rather than an agenda template. Lexcel produces that list from the materials, separated into what looks material and what is only a question, and the underwriter decides what actually gets raised.

Question 10

How does AI review of a purchase agreement work for transactional liability?

Accepted Answer

Purchase agreement review is usually a later-stage workstream, since the draft agreement often is not in the submission and requests for comments frequently arrive as a second-stage ask. The work runs section by section against the team's own playbook: exclusions where a carve-out demands one, deemed edits where the language reaches something like a forward-looking projection, provisions that are not insurable, and the definitional mechanics that move coverage. Every comment points back to the language it came from, and the underwriter decides what actually goes to the broker.

Question 11

What is transactional tax insurance?

Accepted Answer

It covers an identified tax position rather than the unknown breaches an R&W policy covers: whether a tax credit is eligible, in the claimed amount, and transferable, or whether an uncertain position already on a balance sheet will hold up on challenge. Buyers use it to take a known tax risk off the table so a deal can close or a reserve can come off the financials.

Question 12

What is contingent liability insurance?

Accepted Answer

It covers a specific, identified exposure that is already known and quantifiable, most often pending or threatened litigation, a successor liability question, or a disputed ownership or title issue holding up a transaction. Where R&W responds to breaches nobody knew about at signing, contingent liability responds to the one risk everyone has already found and priced.

Question 13

Does this only work for representations and warranties (R&W) insurance, or does it work for tax and contingent liability too?

Accepted Answer

It works across transactional liability. What changes between lines is the criteria the team screens on, the fields that carry the risk, and the documents that support them, so the workflows follow the desk rather than a template.

Question 14

Who is Lexcel built for?

Accepted Answer

Specialty insurance teams: brokers, MGAs, underwriters, and carriers across specialty lines, including transactional liability: R&W, transactional tax, contingent liability, and secondary transaction insurance. Lexcel supports work across the lifecycle, from submission and underwriting through binding and claims, integrated with your systems and data sources. Contact Lexcel to explore a pilot.

Question 15

Do we have to replace Salesforce or SharePoint to start an agentic underwriting workbench?

Accepted Answer

No. The workbench builds the record from your submission materials and syncs verified values into the system of record and document management system you already run. More: https://www.lexcel.ai/journal/how-to-start-an-agentic-underwriting-workbench-without-replacing-your-system-of-record/

Question 16

Can a team start with just claim notices, or just submissions?

Accepted Answer

Yes. A team can start with whichever one repeats often and add the other later.

Question 17

What does the benchmark study show?

Accepted Answer

Same M&A deal, side by side: Lexcel (1 attorney, 1.6 hours) vs. a four-attorney BigLaw team (100+ hours). Lexcel's unreviewed first draft surfaced more material findings on the same commercial contracts scope than the firm's polished final. Methodology and full results: https://www.lexcel.ai/journal/lexcel-vs-biglaw-benchmark/

Question 18

What does getting started actually involve for our team?

Accepted Answer

Most teams start with a pilot rather than a switch. The first stretch is setup and learning: standing up the workbench around the team's own fields and criteria, wiring the integrations into the systems already in use, building the orchestrations and workflows for the work that repeats, and spending enough time with the desk to learn how it actually quotes, reviews, and decides. Then it runs on live deals, which is where the remaining gaps surface and get closed. A first draft of a workflow comes together quickly; what takes longer is the judgment, and the teams that get the most out of it put their own underwriters in the room while it is being built.

Question 19

How does Lexcel pricing work?

Accepted Answer

Subscription pricing scoped to your team size, submission volume, and the lines you write. Contact sales for a quote tailored to your book.

Question 20

How does the Salesforce sync actually work day to day?

Accepted Answer

Today an analyst retypes the front-end submission fields into the system of record by hand, broker, enterprise value, and similar basics, largely so the team can track hit rate and decline rate. That system rarely holds the underwriting substance, the focus areas and concerns, which lives elsewhere until the deal moves toward binding. Verified fields sync out of the workbench into the system of record instead of being keyed twice, and the document behind each value stays open to a reviewer. The practical difference is that the numbers a team is already tracking, hit rate and decline rate among them, start describing what actually happened on the desk.

Question 21

How do submission and claim documents get filed into SharePoint?

Accepted Answer

Most teams build the deal folder by hand, one per submission, then move it between stages as the deal goes from submission to quoted to underwriting, so the folder location is itself the workflow status. Scripted flows over that structure tend to break, because filenames are not consistent enough to reliably pull one document type out. The workbench files the package into the document system over API and keeps the document behind every field, so the folder is built by the work.

Question 22

How do submissions get into the workbench?

Accepted Answer

The same way they already reach the team. Submissions land in a shared submissions inbox and get forwarded on, which creates the record and starts extraction rather than someone opening each email and transcribing the terms into another system by hand. Nothing is re-uploaded and nothing is re-keyed, so the first thing an underwriter sees is a record with the documents already sitting behind each value.

Question 23

What does an organization get from a year of submissions on an agentic underwriting workbench?

Accepted Answer

A year of records against the same fields, which it can sort, filter, and query, with every value traceable to the document behind it. An organization that ran the same year through disconnected tools has a year of documents and nothing to query.

Question 24

What does Lexcel do with our historical policy and claims data?

Accepted Answer

Lexcel ingests archived policies, claims files, and notices, structures them, and surfaces the patterns that drive loss, so pricing, exclusions, and reserves are informed by your own book instead of industry averages. Your data stays your data. Lexcel does not train shared models on it and does not share signal across customers.

Question 25

Is institutional memory just a better document management system?

Accepted Answer

No. A document management system stores files. Institutional memory structures policies, quotes, and claims so the team can retrieve comparable work product with citations on a live matter, then review before anyone relies on it. More: https://www.lexcel.ai/journal/leveraging-institutional-memory-with-agentic-ai-in-specialty-underwriting/

Question 26

How do we keep outdated underwriting positions from becoming the new default?

Accepted Answer

By treating each use of history as its own call. Historical positions inform the live file rather than setting it by default, and every application of prior work is weighed against whether appetite, market practice, or the risk itself has moved since. The underwriter still reviews before any historical position drives a live quote or claim file.

Question 27

Who owns the structured underwriting history?

Accepted Answer

The organization that produced the work product owns it. Agentic AI runs on that organization's materials, under its control. Claims history and internal analysis are among the categories of data that require the highest care.

Question 28

How accurate is automated extraction on submission materials, and what happens when it is wrong?

Accepted Answer

Buyers ask for a guaranteed number, and no honest vendor gives one; what actually holds accuracy up is three things working together. The workflows are structured to reduce the chance of a wrong value in the first place, by asking narrow questions against specific documents rather than turning a model loose on a package. Verification then runs against the cited source before a value is recorded, so an unsupported value is withheld or corrected instead of written in, and a thin or partial package stops and asks rather than producing a limit the documents do not support. On top of that each workflow carries its own evaluations, so changes on our side or shifts in the underlying models get tested against known results rather than trusted, and every field keeps the citation to the page it came from so the underwriter can cross-check any of it.

Question 29

Can we see what the AI did before we rely on it?

Accepted Answer

Two different needs sit behind this question. Reviewers want each value to point back to a specific place, the page and the document, so they can confirm it themselves; separately, teams want the right record to land in the deal file for carrier file audits and claims, where the question is how the underwriter reached a decision. What persists is the team's decision, not the tool's, because underwriters are deliberate about what belongs in a file.

Question 30

How do we trust automated extraction on a live quote or claim file?

Accepted Answer

Material pulls point back to source pages a reviewer can open, and the reviewer accepts or rejects before anything binds or goes outbound. Lexcel also runs extractions through a verification pipeline that checks each pull against the underlying materials before it reaches a reviewer. Trust comes from that verification trail, not from a vendor's promise that the AI is usually right.

Question 31

Where does Lexcel store customer files?

Accepted Answer

AWS S3. Each organization has its own bucket so policy, submission, and claims data does not mix with other customers' data.

Question 32

Is Lexcel SOC 2 certified?

Accepted Answer

Yes. SOC 2 Type II. Lexcel does not train on customer documents or use them to improve models.

Question 33

What AI models power Lexcel?

Accepted Answer

Primarily Claude, with support for swapping in OpenAI and others per task. Quality comes from line-specific tooling and a prompting architecture built for specialty insurance workflows, alongside the models.

FAQs

The workbench

Transactional liability

Getting started

Integrations

History and data

Security and trust