Brokerage, insurtech join forces on a novel underwriting platform

Canadian insurtech MyChoice Financial and brokerage Billyard Insurance Group (BIG) have joined forces on an underwriting and pre-risk assessment platform designed to stop soft (or unintentional) fraud and rate evasion from both broker and consumer perspectives.

The PrecisionX platform embeds underwriting intelligence directly into the broker workflow, identifying underwriting deficiencies and mispriced risks earlier in the process, BIG explains in a press release. This helps manage errors before they become costly exceptions for carrier underwriting teams or downstream claims activity.

Currently, most broker management systems allow brokers to submit applications with errors, missing documents, or eligibility violations, relying on the carrier to catch them downstream, Aren Mirzaian, MyChoice CEO, tells Canadian Underwriter. “PrecisionX effectively places a senior underwriter over the shoulder of every single broker, 24/7.”

For example, the system instantly identifies and flags the following areas of premium leakage that brokers are expected to manually check (along with 70+ other validations):

• Missing claims and convictions: It cross-references the quote against MVRs (motor vehicle records) and DASH (driver and auto search history) to find undisclosed history
• Date first licensed mismatches: It specifically catches out-of-country experience that doesn’t align with domestic equivalents
• Garaging location: PrecisionX identifies address discrepancies between the driver’s licence and the policy address
• Unlisted drivers and vehicles: Flags household members or vehicles from prior policies that were omitted. This is critical for preventing rate evasion, where high-risk drivers (like a teen or spouse with convictions) are intentionally hidden to artificially suppress premiums, Mirzaian says.

“There is currently nothing in the market just quite like PrecisionX,” he says. “To our knowledge, no other brokerage in Canada is pre-underwriting at this level of technical enforcement.”

Core underwriting objectives

The artificial intelligence-based platform is built around three core underwriting objectives:

• Reducing loss-ratio volatility through improved risk assessment prior to bind
• Improving underwriting accuracy by standardizing and validating data inputs in real time during underwriting and binding
• Increasing operational efficiency by minimizing manual reviews, rework and exception handling.

“The goal was to improve how risk is assessed before it ever reaches binding,” BIG CEO Stephen Billyard says in the release. “If you can standardize, validate, and enrich submissions upstream, you reduce friction across the entire value chain.

“What we’ve seen so far is a measurable improvement in speed, efficiency and accuracy, with early indicators pointing to stronger risk assessment and reduced downstream underwriting friction.”

MyChoice and BIG have been working in partnership on the project over the past two years. The technology has resulted in material loss-ratio improvements for carrier partners by identifying risks earlier in the process, Mirzaian reports. The platform has been in the market for more than a year now.

MyChoice takes over the printing of the insurance application, as well as the billing and signing process. “If the risk doesn’t fit the carrier’s appetite or the data doesn’t validate, the application simply cannot be generated,” Mirzaian says.

If there’s an issue, the system “forces compliance,” he adds. It triggers a ‘hard stop’ when specific proof is required, such as a winter tire invoice, letter of experience, or driver’s licence history report.

PrecisionX reads and validates the proof upon upload and references it against the discrepancy. While a human might miss a small date discrepancy or hidden claim, the system catches it instantly.

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“Industry observers note that this type of pre-emptive underwriting support is becoming increasingly critical as insurers tighten guidelines and place greater emphasis on submission quality, consistency, and predictability from distribution partners,” BIG says in the release. “That shift has increasingly drawn carrier attention upstream, toward how risk is prepared and validated before it enters core underwriting systems.”

Mirzaian says the hope is this type of technology will lead to better results not just for insurers, but consumers as well through more transparency and less bait and switch, for example.

MyChoice also recently partnered with Guidewire through its Insurtech Vanguards program and will be demonstrating PrecisionX capabilities at the Guidewire Marketplace Summit in Toronto on Mar. 5.

Jason Contant

Jason has been an award-winning journalist with Canadian Underwriter for more than a decade, including the past three years as associate editor and, before that, as digital editor for seven years.