RPA in Insurance - Focus on policyholders, not on time-intensive processes

Automation is essential to the insurance industry’s digital transformation success. Touchless and straight-through claims processing is currently the most significant automation opportunity for insurance. Well-planned and comprehensive processing helps insurance leaders focus more on policyholders and drive business growth with operational efficiency.  

We take you through the various benefits insurance companies can expect by automating day-to-day time-intensive processes and how they can implement RPA to achieve radical automation.

Benefits of RPA solutions 

Insurers get a non-invasive way to automate core insurance processes, meaning they don’t need to replace existing core insurance process applications.

Policy holder’s data remains safe as the software robots do not store their data, and the data they use is encrypted in transit and at rest.

Core insurance data and processes get tied together at a much lower cost and risk against application upgrades, replacements, or heavy-handed Business Process Automation implementations.

Audits are complete and accurate, improving risk profiling and compliance, freeing up time to focus on higher-value work.

Automation Candidates in Insurance

New Business and Underwriting

RPA’s role in underwriting is to amalgamate data from different sources to assess the risk associated with any insurance accurately. Using a set of rules, it can go one step further and make recommendations about accepting the risk by assigning an acceptability score, which can be used for decision-making and pricing.

Policy Administration and Servicing

RPA allows the issuance system to read data and process it from other systems, for example, vehicle inspection modules in case of motor insurance or receipt in case of finance. It essentially automates transactional and administrative parts of accounting, settlements, risk capture, etc. It also minimizes time for policy servicing requests such as modifications and cancellations. Additionally, it can help keep track of proposals and track delivery status by reading/ interacting with external mediums such as courier companies and postal authorities.

Sales and Distribution

RPA can be leveraged in sales administration by preparing automated customizable and gamified scorecards that read sales figures/ reports. RPA provides better prospect data based on models built internally by establishing a detailed propensity index.

Regulatory Compliance and Process efficiencies

The audit trail provided by RPA helps with regulatory compliance, which further supports process improvement. Some of the use cases where RPA can significantly contribute to improving regulatory processes are validating customer information, flag non-compliance in real-time based on a defined set of rules/ parameters, and generate regulatory reports.

Claims Registration and Processing

RPA can further help integrate different claim processing information from multiple sources. The insurance industry can automate the manually intensive processes like extraction of data, complex error tracking, claim verification, and more; consequently, speeding up the process and creating a better customer experience.

Fraud flagging and prevention

Fraud flagging and identification can be facilitated at all processing points within an organization, be it pre-sales, sales, or claims. External sources of information such as industry-level data on serial offenders or other industry collated information sources can be brought together to tackle frauds in a better manner.

RPA in insurance is a commendable technology trend and has had a very positive outset. The challenges faced by insurance firms received a helping ‘automated hand’ and the prospects for further development are more than encouraging. It will eventually become a necessary component for insurance providers to remain competitive industry leaders.