The insurance business is fueled by documents—contracts, policies, appraisals, claims, proposals, compliance requirements, customer service logs and more. These pieces of content make up over 80-85 percent of the data in most business organizations—and they are absolutely integral to many of the processes core to insurers’ business. Yet, an incredibly small percentage of this data (1-2 percent) is leveraged with existing analytics or automation technologies. As a result, the business processes that depend on this data remain highly manual, requiring extra time, cost and expert resources to manage on a one-by-one basis.Executive SummaryIntelligent process automation is a form of artificial intelligence that uses deep learning technology to automate processes involving unstructured data—and it is part of the next wave of automation in the insurance industry, according to Tom Wilde, the leader of Indico, an IPA provider. Wilde explains the benefits of IPA beyond RPA and describes some use cases for the P/C insurance industry.
As insurance companies look to expand their digital transformation efforts, automating and augmenting the workflows related to these documents should be high on their list. In doing so they can address some core productivity issues while gaining significant potential benefit:
Knowledge capture: One of the risks for insurers is that much of the knowledge within their organization about manual processes isn’t captured or codified anywhere. Experienced staff members leave the building every night with important knowledge about a given process. This makes it difficult to onboard new team members properly and limits scalability of processes across teams. Automation of these processes is a great forcing function to capture the specific steps and context required. Operational efficiency: Reducing the number of hands that have to touch any given process is an obvious path to greater efficiency. And freeing people from a lot of the mundane tasks that come with these processes enables them to focus on higher-value activities. Increased capacity: In recent years, many insurers have shifted their focus from cost control to capacity expansion—growing revenue without growing expense by enabling existing resources and team members to accomplish more. It’s a huge opportunity to expand margins and grow their business. Faster cycle time: For insurers, the competitive landscape is increasingly driven by customer service and response times. Many have built their brand around it. The ability to make quick decisions about claims, policy approvals, costs and appraisals can be a huge differentiator.Existing Automation Approaches Fall Short