Robotic Process Automation In The Insurance Industry

According to McKinsey, 25% of the insurance industry will be automated by 2025. Indeed, most insurance companies are now using robotic process automation (RPA) in one way or another. While that’s a good thing overall, the current RPA strategy of automating singular tasks within larger processes is leading to the creation of automation “silos.” Such silos may provide immediate tactical benefits, but they also stand in the way of greater organizational efficiency.

That leaves insurers feeling like they’ve hit a new roadblock that needs solving: How can automation weave complex processes together more holistically—and in a way that adds value to the business?

The future of automation in the insurance industry—and the solution to this challenge—is hyperautomation. Here’s what robotic process automation looks like in today’s insurance industry and how hyperautomation takes RPA to the next level.

See how easy it is to implement hyperautomation with Nividous, the only automation platform that combines RPA, AI, and business process automation right out of the box. Schedule a demo today.

The Need For Robotic Process Automation In Insurance

In many ways, insurance products are becoming commodities. Digitization has made it easy for new players to enter the industry, putting pressure on established insurance firms to drive down prices. As a result, most insurers are looking at how to boost their decreasing profit margins.

Increasingly, insurance products are finding their way into customers’ hands not through insurance professionals but through channel partners—corporate agents, car dealerships, financial advisors, and more—most of whom want the option to deliver insurance products digitally. This is a welcome opportunity for insurance companies, but it also poses something of a challenge: Few companies are well-equipped to build a mass of new digital product configurations, much less to support them. They continue to struggle with:

• Time-consuming manual processes. Many insurers still heavily rely on people to get things done, like rekeying information from one application to another and gathering data from multiple sources. The inordinate amount of time spent on these activities would decrease the benefits produced by a strategic partnership—and would, in most cases, limit the potential number of such partnerships.
• Legacy applications. Most insurers have a legacy core system that is difficult to manage on an organizational level. These sprawling, complex systems were not designed with configurability in mind and cannot support the modernization and efficiency efforts required to adequately sustain such partnerships.

Insurers that hope to support hundreds of channel partner relationships must take advantage of automation to overcome these challenges.

Why isn’t RPA enough?

There’s no doubt that insurers must employ technology to remain competitive—and until now, RPA was the best solution.

But RPA only automates a small piece of a larger task. To solve a complex business problem, you need a holistic automation approach.

The process of issuing insurance coverage is multifaceted and complex—a combination of steps that require both the intelligence and insights of people along with simple decision-making abilities that an RPA bot could handle. Hyperautomation is about automating a process from end to end, orchestrating it all to maximize efficiency.

Some scenarios where you can employ hyperautomation (or “smart bots”) and RPA in insurance include:

Scrutinization of new policy applications for underwriting:

• RPA bots fetch application forms and supporting documents for cases under scrutiny.
• Smart bots with native Computer Vision-based Optical Character Recognition (OCR) capabilities extract relevant data.
• RPA bots perform all required validations on the extracted data against an internal application and documents.
• Based on the validations, RPA bots raise change requests in case of missing documents or corrections, approve and pass the policy for issuance if all validations are met, or pass the proposal to an underwriter when critical decisions are required.
• RPA bots handle change request cases when the requirement is fulfilled.

Customer service case classification:

• RPA bots continuously monitor a CRM application to manage the high influx of service requests.
• Smart bots read and understand the requests and classify them into relevant categories for a service desk agent to handle.
• If all the required information is available, the bot performs necessary actions to address the request and sends a success email to the requester. If the request lacks any required information, the bot sends an email asking the requestor to share the necessary information.
• In cases of low confidence, RPA bots move the emails to an exception folder for manual categorization.

Premium calculations for channel partner integrations:

• RPA bots perform complex calculations on multiple Excel sheets (and several tabs within single Excel documents) to generate quotes used by sales reps in real-time. The bots make it possible for users to generate over 5,000 quotes per day. This automation enabled a service-based architecture, allowing quick and seamless integration with partner banks, mobile applications, and core business systems.

Need help improving your insurance processes?

If you’re experiencing an efficiency problem or looking for ways to maximize the value of your workers, talk to us at Nividous. We have extensive experience implementing hyperautomation and robotic process automation in insurance and would love to help.

Nividous is one of the very few platforms that offers hyperautomation capabilities—RPA, insurance business process automation, and artificial intelligence—right out of the box. This combination of technologies makes it possible to automate very sophisticated processes (not just single tasks), freeing up your people to do more valuable work. You can avoid the costly strategy of using multiple vendors for automation, and just use one: one platform and one support cost for all your automation needs.

If you’d like to see our platform in action—and talk to us about how it can improve your insurance-related processes—schedule a demo. Or, check out our case studies to see how we’ve helped other insurance companies.