Insurance providers rely on highly manual processes for document processing as well as other routine tasks. This is slow, prone to manual error and limits scalability. A shift is underway as insurance firms are turning to intelligent automation for a plethora of use cases that enhance efficiency, accuracy, scalability and customer satisfaction. Research indicates that by 2024, over 60% of insurance carriers will adopt some degree of automation.
Intelligent Process Automation (IPA) that harnesses both Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Robotic Process Automation (RPA) can solve the challenges of insurance document and claim processing huge volumes of unstructured documents and content in a fraction of the time compared to manual effort. OCR cannot read and understand such unstructured data, but AI overcomes this challenge for automating processing of unstructured content. Such technology can also surmount more complex difficulties in process efficiency via hyperautomation – automation of end-to-end processes.
Potential Impact of IPA
- Impact on Insurance Employees. Employees can focus on higher value tasks while IPA handles the routine, data-intensive tasks with regard to document processing. While the AI component of IPA can handle processing unstructured content, the RPA component mimics human actions and connects end-to-end processes.
- Technological Transformation. Intelligent automation solutions can be implemented to work with existing IT infrastructure allowing for automation of specific tasks and processes as well as hyperautomation with humans in the loop as needed.
- Personalized Customer Experiences. AI’s Natural Language Processing (NLP) capabilities allow companies to provide conversational support services. Intelligent automation is also applicable to customer onboarding and customer support with a high degree of personalization. This boosts customer satisfaction which is good for business in the long-term.
Promising Insurance Automation Use Cases
The key to a successful intelligent automation initiative lies in choosing the right use case. Let’s take a closer look at feasible use cases.
- Processing Claims
Processing claims in a swift and accurate manner is imperative to a competitive edge. Despite this, it is most often a time-consuming, highly manual process that is taxing for both insurance agents as well as the customer. Typically claims processing can take up to a few days to complete because of agents having to verify the credibility of data from multiple sources, such as:
- Medical certificates and reports for health insurance or life insurance claims.
- Photos of damaged baggage and flight boarding passes for travel loss claims.
- Police reports, drivers’ license and vehicle damage photos in case of an auto claim.
Such processes are highly prone to human error resulting in mismatched data or inaccurate details. By implementing an IPA solution for claims processing workflow that encompasses claims intake, assessment as well as claims settlement you can eliminate friction, errors and optimize cost. By automating claims processing you can eliminate 80% of manual work as well time taken to do so by 50%. Create streamlined and more efficient workflows for claim-processing.
- Policy Management
Another common tedious procedure that insurance companies have to deal with is the entire spectrum of policy management that entails issuing policies and their corresponding updates. When issuing new policies pre-underwriting checks have to be completed along with a number of underwriting decisions. Once completed the policy has to be issued which means a substantial amount of information has to be updated in internal systems and communicated to customers. These are document heavy processes that can benefit from the intervention of IPA – AI can automate the processing of unstructured documents while RPA takes care of the feeding information downstream into internal systems and sending updates to customers.
Such solutions can also automate processing of loss run reports, analysis of the statement of value reports, communication explanations of evidence of insurability to customers and other such processes.
- Regulatory Compliance
Insurance companies have a long list of regulations that they have to comply with. Whenever there are amendments to these regulations it forces insurance providers to reorganize their processes in order to adapt. IPA can play a critical role in assisting insurance agents when it comes to processes such as these, because it saves employees from having to go through legions of repetitive, data-intensive manual operations. When your processes are automated using AI & RPA capabilities it can save you from errors and ensure the accuracy of data.
With accurate data you can monitor regulatory compliance in real time with internal reviews and be better prepared in the event of an external audit. Some examples of IPA-driven automations for insurance could be name screening, compliance checking, client research and validation of customer data, customer data security operations and regulatory reports.
- Underwriting
Underwriting involves gathering and analyzing information from a number of disparate sources in order to determine and mitigate the risks that might be involved with said policy.
- Health risk. When an applicant is a smoker the mortality charges and therefore premiums are expected to go up.
- Financial Limits. If the net worth of an applicant is set at $X then their insurance coverage cannot exceed $10X.
- An applicant credit rating is important as it might be capped by previous agencies.
- Duplicate Policies. Does the applicant have a prior policy under their name in place already?
As you can see, insurance companies stand to gain a plethora of benefits by harnessing the power of AI and IPA capabilities.
Are you considering intelligent automation for insurance document processing uses cases in your organization and hyperautomation for end-to-end process automation? If you’d like to explore opportunities where your business can benefit from IPA implementations for hyperautomation, the Rapid Acceleration Partners team would be glad to help. Our next-gen, AI-powered content intelligence platform RAPFlow enables full lifecycle AI orchestration on a single platform. When used in tandem with our RPA solution RAPBot, it provides end-to-end workflow automation capabilities that can be deployed in just weeks. You can even build your own use case and the platform can easily integrate with your existing systems. Book a demo to get a more detailed understanding of how our products can transform your business.
