Asheesh Mehra, Group CEO & Co-Founder at AntWorks
Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning have gained somewhat of a reputation as a silver bullet for the insurance industry. This is mainly due to its capability of automating and delivering greater levels of intelligence to specific insurance and business processes. What’s more, with the help of AI, insurance companies can improve the overall efficiency of their operations.
Insurance companies adopting AI to improve their market standing gain competitive advantage as a whole. However, this was not always the case. The insurance industry has for a long time now been held back by its reluctance to innovate and adapt due to barriers of regulation, lengthy processes and product complexity. This could all soon change. Insurers are looking towards AI in a bid to provide faster, better, and more efficient services to their customers. This also coincides with the rise of Insurtech, the use of technology innovation in insurance. This means that insurance companies are now looking to move away from the traditional legacy-based modus operandi and adapting to an evolving marketplace. A marketplace where AI such as Intelligent Automation (IA) is infiltrating systems and transforming business processes.
A new opportunity
The insurance industry is one of the most regulated and oldest business service industries in the world. An industry built on trust and customer care that is still reliant on the human touch by way of complicated, manual, and paper-based processes. This may explain the industry’s lack of adaptability and its reluctance to embrace digital innovation.
As a result of this, customer care, one of the main pillars that the industry has been built on, lacked much-needed quality for a long time now. Customers have to endure time-consuming bureaucratic processes that are often not even tailored to their special needs or demands when it comes to applying for insurance policies. What’s more, the slow-paced nature of processes means delays in generating insurance renewals quotes will start to impact a firm’s ability to generate revenue. The sheer volume of business data, mainly comprised of unstructured data that needs to be processed and analysed, along with the complex business rules that need to be followed, point towards a desperate need for improvement. Time has now come for insurance companies to look at ways to improve their operational processes through technology innovation. AI has the capabilities to help insurance practitioners to do business much faster, more efficiently, and with greater security.
Insuretech: AI is here to stay
Many insurance companies have started adopting and implementing various different AI technologies in their operational processes in a bid to not only improve their customer experience but also their bottom line. One of them is Intelligent Automation (IA), the holistic automation of business data of all kinds. Many Insurers are looking to expedite renewal policy quotes with automation to gain faster and more customer centric results. IA can process large volumes of data and ensure the generation of faster, and more accurate results. In fact, according to a recent McKinsey report, automation can reduce the cost of insurance claims journeys by almost 30 percent. A leading HR consulting firm used IA to improve its processing speed by 70%. The company implemented the technology to manage large volumes of data and provide optimised quotations to customers for new policies and renewals. This in turn lead to higher customer renewals, an increase in customer acquisition rates and increased revenues.
This isn’t a surprise considering Intelligent Automation Platforms can analyse and process large amounts of unstructured data and complex business contracts at a fraction of the time compared to traditional insurance processes. IA does this two-fold; firstly by process discovery, as this can help identify and confirm the feasibility of process automation opportunities, therefore optimising repetitive human-driven processes and achieving enterprise-wide scalability. Secondly, by way of identifying and seeking out clean, readily available data via straight-through processing.
IA can also effectively eliminate the chances of delays occurring that could impact a firm’s revenue generation. IA platforms built with powerful data ingestion modules can read printed and handwritten text scanned documents and images, signatures, and PDFs. This enables insurers to generate more insurance renewal quotes in less time and with better quality. Faster, superior, and more tailor-made insurance renewal quotes will certainly improve the bottom line as well as customer retention and acquisition rates. In addition to this, enterprises will also be able to speed up workflows and unlock new revenue streams.
A benefactor of a national insurance provider used IA to abandon their pre-existing lengthy processing period for detailed documents. The technology managed to help them eliminate manual tasks by 75% and increase the processing accuracy. More specifically, the IA platform not only helped process unstructured data that included handwritten fields, but also signatures and checkboxes within the policy documents. Crucially, integrated automation platforms can provide customers with a level of transparency not seen before, making it easier for customers to interact with brokers and review insurance rates. Naturally, this level of customer experience will likely lead to greater customer satisfaction and client retention.
For those companies in the insurance industry yet to explore the potential of AI, it is now time to consider how they can go about investing in the technology. Identifying the specific needs for automation and implementing the right AI tools will enable insurance companies to achieve far greater operational efficiency and stronger revenue streams than ever before.
