With interest rates near zero percent, insurance carriers are facing a shifting paradigm. Investment income will not be able to drive return on equity alone, and the combined ratio will have to bear the burden of its own weight. Consequently, organizations have renewed their interest in insurance operations. Executive SummaryAnuj Jain, an executive for the insurance outsourcing and operations firm ReSource Pro, describes four best practices for insurance carriers attempting to integrate automation into carrier workflows and highlights some of the common mistakes to avoid. Among them is failing to ensure the process being automated is the most efficient and accurate, Jain writes, noting that bad habits can lead to bad automation outcomes. Summing up, he notes that organizations should expect incremental results with processes that generate most impact being automated first, and more becoming possible every year thereafter.
After years of underinvestment in technology for some, amid heightened M&A activity for others, there are carriers operating in an environment built on a legacy patch job. Manual processes are maintaining the organization’s operations, just waiting for a digital transformation agenda to come along and shake up the status quo.
Enter automation. Market participants have typically viewed automation as an interim solution, one that provides incremental efficiencies at a lower cost when investing in a full digital transformation is not economically viable.
That said, automation is not a silver bullet.
For an automation implementation plan to be successful, companies should consider these four best practices:
Automation must be a business-led solution. Automation requires pre-work. Automation can fail and requires humans in the loop. Automation should be considered an organizational change management exercise.Automation as a Business Solution