Commercial Underwriter – New Business

We are excited to bring to market, an opportunity to join our well established and successful Birmingham or Reading branches.

You will play a key role in helping us to achieve our targets by developing profitable relationships with our Broker Partners. You will deliver on trading team targets through effective underwriting of mid-market sized commercial risks within agreed authority levels, whilst delivering an excellent customer service to key brokers. In return, we offer you the tools to maximise your potential to become a high achieving Commercial Underwriter.

As a Commercial Underwriter, you will develop credibility with brokers and customers, using effective questioning to understand all aspects of importance to both broker and customer, and design a solution which meets those. This will require information gathering, a strong knowledge of policy wordings and industry trends to select, understand and assess risks and makes sound assessments of the probability of exposure to determine a suitable premium from an accurately established technical price.

The role encompasses many opportunities to contribute to the development and success of the branch account, not just from a growth and profitability perspective but driving service excellence to our customers. The team ensure close collaboration is supported internally across the teams to be set up for success, as well as engaging and building key relationships with the brokers and panel aligned business developers.

This is about working smarter and more efficiently - giving us the perfect platform to deliver our business strategy.

At AXA we’re adopting a Hybrid way of working, empowering our people to balance their time between home and the Birmingham / Reading branch in a way that works best for them, their team and our customers.

What you’ll be doing:

• Underwrite Property & Casualty business profitably, accurately, consistently and in line with established underwriting practices, using the full range of appetite and tools available.
• Build trading relationships with brokers, through visits and large case liaison, to maximise financial results and to generate pipeline new business opportunities
• Build a reputation as a trading expert with a panel of intermediaries and build confidence in the branch ability through interaction with our Underwriting Technical Centre
• Contribute to meetings with brokers and end customers to portray AXA capabilities and secure new business opportunities.
• Demonstrate contribution to loss ratio control by effectively implementing branch UW controls 
• Contribute to the development of colleagues by coaching and acting as a reference point to assist in decision making within empowerment.
• Support SME Hub colleagues in building trading relationships with intermediaries to enable a consistent service to be delivered
• Supply underwriting and administration support as required.
• Produce timely and accurate documentation.

Qualifications

• Dip CII Qualification or working towards ACII qualification
• Exposure to the UK General Insurance market is essential, including existing trading relationships specifically across the Birmingham / Reading markets
• Strong trading capability – commercial awareness, negotiation skills, ability to build strong broker relationships
• Pragmatic and confident decision maker with good numerical reasoning skills
• Strong analytical skills with proven experience of account monitoring and action planning
• Technical underwriting expertise in a composite insurance environment (non-package)
• Sound knowledge of legislative and regulatory requirements for insurance (including treating customers fairly)
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills
• Risk assessment and risk management skills

IDD: This position has been defined as an Insurance Distribution Directive (IDD) role under the IDD regime which means that in addition to pre-employment screening checks, the successful candidate will be subject to background screening every 4 years with an annual declaration in interim years.

What We Offer

One of the best things about joining AXA is our rewards package. At AXA UK, we’re appreciative of the people who work for us and our rewards package is reviewed regularly to reflect that. You can expect to receive:

• Competitive annual salary
• Annual company & performance-based bonus
• Contributory pension scheme (up to 12% employer contributions)
• Life Assurance (up to 10 x annual salary)
• 23 days annual leave plus Bank Holidays
• Opportunity to buy up to 5 extra days leave or sell up to 3 days leave
• AXA employee discounts
• Gym benefits

AXA is proud to support the needs of our employees and as such understands everyone has individual work and home life responsibilities. We’re happy to discuss flexible working arrangements for this role, should this be a requirement for you.

At AXA, we want to become one of the most inspiring companies to work for and to achieve this ambition, we need the best talent to come and work for us. We look for candidates with the right skills and values to join us and selection is based on a fair and equal process. We’re proud to be committed to equal opportunities and welcome applications from all backgrounds. As a financial services company, all successful candidates will be subject to preemployment checks, so we can ensure regulatory compliance.