Submission Data Management in Insurance: Structuring Unstructured Data

In insurance, the clock starts ticking the moment a submission hits your inbox. Whether it’s a broker forwarding a package for new business, an MGA submitting a bordereau, or a reinsurer reviewing schedules for treaty pricing - speed and accuracy in handling that submission determine whether you win the business or lose the opportunity. Yet for most carriers and MGAs, submission intake remains the slowest, messiest part of the underwriting workflow.

Submissions still arrive in every format imaginable: Excel files, PDFs, scanned documents, zip folders, Word attachments - usually over email, occasionally via portal, almost never in the same structure twice. And for high-volume teams, this means underwriters spend as much time hunting for usable data as they do evaluating the risk.

The result? Delayed quotes, missed SLAs, frustrated brokers, and overwhelmed underwriting operations. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

Explore the Submission Data Management Series

This pillar page is part of Inaza’s Submission Data Management series - a deep dive into how insurance carriers, MGAs, brokers, and reinsurers are automating their intake processes and transforming submission chaos into underwriting clarity.

Each blog below focuses on a critical angle: triage, data quality, bordereaux automation, ACORD normalization, underwriting prioritization, and more. If submission overload is your daily reality, this series is for you.

• Submission Intake Automation: How P&C Insurers Are Eliminating Bottlenecks
  
  
• Beyond the Spreadsheet: Modernizing Bordereau Submissions for MGAs and Reinsurers
  
  
• How to Standardize Submission Data Across Brokers, MGAs, and Carriers
  
  
• The Hidden Cost of Manual Bordereau Processing - and How to Fix It
  
  
• AI-Powered Submission Triage: Prioritize What Matters Most
  
  
• 5 Ways to Improve Data Quality in Insurance Submissions
  
  
• How Reinsurers Can Streamline Bordereau Ingestion with Automation
  
  
• Are Your Underwriters Drowning in Submissions? Fixing the Volume Challenge with Smart Automation
  
  
• The Role of ACORD Standards in Scalable Submission Management
  
  
• Brokers & Submission Friction: Solving the Last-Mile Problem in Data Intake
  
  

The Problem: Submission Intake is Slowing Everything Down

Whether you're an underwriter, COO, or operations lead, you already know the pain: submissions are flooding in faster than teams can process them. Your brokers are chasing quotes, your underwriters are stuck rekeying data, and your most valuable resources are bogged down in intake grunt work.

Bordereaux files are sent without headers. ACORD forms are scanned sideways. Risk schedules are dumped into spreadsheets with merged cells, hidden columns, or inconsistencies across tabs. Your team spends hours just getting data into shape - and that’s before risk evaluation even begins.

And because submission data is unstructured and inconsistent, it’s nearly impossible to route cleanly into downstream systems. That leads to more manual entry, delayed decisioning, and a serious hit to quote turnaround and broker satisfaction.

The outcome? You’re slower to market. You lose placement opportunities. And you burn operational budget doing work your systems should already be handling.

Why Existing “Solutions” Haven’t Solved It

Over the past decade, carriers and MGAs have tried to tackle submission chaos in three main ways: portals, outsourcing, and light automation. Each has fallen short.

Portals require brokers to conform to a new submission process - but adoption rates are patchy, and large broker partners rarely play by someone else’s rules. Outsourcing moves the burden offshore, but doesn’t fix the data problem. And basic OCR or RPA systems break when faced with unstructured documents, nested tables, or handwritten notes.

The reality is: traditional tools were never designed for the variability, scale, and speed required in modern submission management. And they certainly weren’t designed for reinsurance bordereaux, MGA feeds, or high-volume broker pipelines.

You don’t need more inbox rules or manual triage. You need intelligence - at scale.

The New Model: Real-Time, AI-Driven Submission Intake

Inaza’s Submission Data Management platform solves the problem at the source - by transforming all incoming submission data into clean, structured, usable information automatically.

Every email. Every file. Every schedule. No templates required.

We ingest submissions via email, API, SFTP, or portal upload. Then we extract every data point from attachments - PDFs, Excel files, Word docs, images, even scanned forms - using a combination of large language models (LLMs), vision AI, and our proprietary insurance ontology.

That raw data is then normalized and mapped to your internal schema - whether you use ACORD, internal proprietary formats, or reinsurer-specific layouts. We enrich it with missing data (geolocation, CAT codes, VIN decoding), assess completeness, and assign risk scores to route it where it belongs.

From there, you can push structured data into any destination: your underwriting workbench, broker CRM, policy admin system, claims platform, or back out to brokers with automated follow-ups.

How Inaza Works (Without Disrupting What Already Does)

Integration doesn’t mean disruption. Inaza plugs into your existing workflows, not the other way around.

Whether your team manages submissions in shared inboxes, broker email aliases, or integrated submission gateways - we sit on top and transform what comes in.

There’s no template building. No lengthy configuration cycles. No need to teach the system what a loss run or schedule looks like - it already knows.

And because it’s API-first, you can route outputs wherever you need them: underwriting platforms, document storage, broker dashboards, actuarial models, or regulatory reporting pipelines.

Why This Matters Now

Your underwriting team is probably already stretched. Your brokers expect faster quotes, cleaner feedback, and more transparency. And your competitors are investing in automation - not to cut people, but to enable them.

If you're still processing submission data manually, you’re at risk of falling behind. Inaza’s customers have seen quote response times improve by 60%, with 80% fewer manual touchpoints per submission. They’ve eliminated bottlenecks, scaled without new hires, and built a competitive edge brokers actually notice.

In a world where speed wins deals and accuracy controls risk, submission data management isn’t back-office admin. It’s front-line competitive infrastructure.

Ready to eliminate submission chaos? Talk to our team today.