By: Pratibha Sahoo and Kalyan Kumar JM

The primary purpose of insurance is to provide risk coverage, and insurers have been striving hard to achieve this purpose. Needless to say, data is a pivotal element for insurance companies for ages, not just to perform regular activities like identifying target customers, providing risk coverage, settling claims, etc., but also to survive in this competitive era by planning ahead.

Historically, insurance companies have collected data through the traditional process of interacting with customers through agents/brokers, application forms, and other supporting documents, where data is extracted and captured manually in each phase. It is a step-wise process where data first enters the mail room, after which, it is screened by the back-office team to derive meaningful information. It is a time-consuming process needing lots of manpower, resulting in excessive operating costs.

Considering hyper-automation has revolutionized the fundamentals of data management, insurers have started to understand the impact of adapting modern ways of collecting, analyzing, and storing data for various purposes. All core activities of an insurance company remain the same, but the ways to perform them have changed with the impact of automation. Technology has dilated from being people-centric to computerization (adaption of computers and automation), to digitization, and subsequently towards hyper-automation. This had led to insurance companies transforming their physical operations to intelligent automation.

Competition and automation have ensured that data management is of foremost importance to insurance companies. Hence, the purpose and aspects of data collection have changed drastically. Listed below are the modern process aspects of insurance companies where automation has helped in reducing human efforts to focus more on core work.

With the advent of technology and the increase in volumes of data, a decreasing trend has been observed for all processes in the insurance life cycle. This blog and the upcoming series will focus on how insurance companies make use of technology to collect and process data into required information, thus ensuring data confidentiality.

With changing times, insurers receive new business applications/policy servicing requests/claim notifications from customers and intermediaries through various online platforms and emails, which in turn are circulated via interconnected systems to all the required people/decision makers. Automation helps seamless processing of this information, starting from reading an email and extracting the required information through artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) capabilities like API, screen scraping, service calls, bots, etc. AI/ML capabilities go beyond data extraction and help in data refining, structuring, and organizing in a way that is expected by downstream applications.

Hyper automation is likely to impact the insurance industry due to advancements in AI/ML capabilities. It even takes it to the next level and automates the automation – dynamically discovering business processes and creating bots to automate them. Hyper automation was identified by Gartner as one of the year’s top 10 strategic technology trends.

Conclusion:

Insurance companies have started to reap the benefits of automation in various processes, predominantly in submission and claims. It has enhanced operational efficiency, conversion rate, efficient underwriting and better scalability, higher customer satisfaction, and retention. Automation also helps in understanding the behavioral patterns of customers by facilitating new products catering to relevant customer segments. This prepares insurance companies to stay ahead in the face of competition.

Hyper-automation is the new trend where insurance companies are looking to leverage opportunities. The next blog will focus on the ‘how’ part of hyper-automation and the difference it will create in the insurance process.

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