Where have you seen RPA benefits within the Insurance Industry?

Hi Diana, 

There are countless opportunities for RPA in the insurance industry. For starters, RPA deals with a multitude of data types and as insurance companies are no stranger to large amounts of data, automation would be quite useful. From claims processing to renewing policies, there isn’t much that most RPA tools can’t handle. With data handling also comes document management which, if automated through RPA, can allow companies to make the best use of their employees. While these are just a few examples, UiPath has stated that insurance companies have the potential to automate up to 70% of their company! Additionally, RPA is proven by McKinsey Digital to have reduced the cost of claims handling by up to 30%. 

Best of Luck!

1. Auto batching of emails received to right grouo of people on quote, policy, claim, renewal etc. type.

2. Auto run several types long duration Suspense Account Status Reports, zipand email to users.

3. Updating bounced emai information to excel  eg. Policy no, Email address, reason of failed sending 

4. Auto download sanction data to refresh database and auto screen thru for new business beneficial owner and authorized representative.

5. etc...

Hi there,

I have a client who previously shelved their RPA project as they were not getting the value they had hoped. After investigation from our side the following came to light, explaining why the project had not worked as well as they would have liked:

 - they approached it on a "one process at a time" and expected ROI immediately 

- there was little to no ownership from the business as it was seen as an IT "fad" which would not affect them.

- their business analysts were not empowered to understand the nature in which RPA would change their processes and way of working. They tried to automate with little or no change. 

They were a disillusioned team who had spent long hours bickering and wasting money. 

It was a long change management intervention before any value from RPA was realised. But now they are both happy and a reference site for the benefits of RPA. 

Happy to discuss how and why but the biggest learning I have from this is the following - if you don't have a view of "hyper automation" from the beginning you have an uphill battle ahead. Start looking division wide, not function specific unless you have a very key process that can make an impact. And create a "lighthouse" as quickly as possible so that the other business areas can see RPA in action, creating a pull factor...your pipeline of processes needs to be full!

Hi Diana,

There are several automation opportunities and benefits that the insurance sector can reap by implementing RPA in their processes. Several insurance firms have already reaped benefits with RPA in different use cases in the insurance value chain. I’m listing some examples as well as some innovative ways in which RPA can help processes like pricing, quotation, policy, and underwriting.

1. Faster Claim Settlement: Lemonade, a US insurer, set the world record of settling a claim within three seconds. This could not have been possible without automation. A human would’ve taken at least a few hours to look into the claim. But A.I. Jim (read Artificial Intelligence Jim), Lemonade’s claims bot, made it possible in record-setting three seconds. The bot reviewed the claim, checked it against his policy, and ran the 18 anti-fraud algorithms within seconds to approve it.

2. Dynamic Pricing: In the insurance sector, the insurance premium changes with the context of sales and risk. RPA can be used to create automated pricing decisions for the insurance. A system can analyze the car model, mileage, driver demographics, etc., to analyze risk profile and set pricing accordingly. They can train the pricing algorithms to analyze all factors and use machine learning to decide the premium price.

3. Policy Management: There are several policies in the insurance sector and one such is KYC or Know Your Customer. RPA implementation can eliminate the manual process of cross-checking documents with public databases to pass claims. KYC automation can instantly create a picture of the client by fetching data from different sources. This can help the insurance company save onboarding costs by as much as 70%.

4. Speeding-Up Underwriting: RPA bots can be used in the insurance sector to streamline and speed up the process of assessing any application against the set rules and checklists. It can also dig data from external agencies like CIBIL, Experian, etc., to check the creditworthiness of an applicant.

For Insurance Domain, the potential benefits of RPA can include:

• ~50% reduction in Manual FTE work & 58% reduction in manual efforts.


• ~70% improvement in processing time.


• Ease of implementation with initial results possible within 30 working days.


• Complete Audit Trial and alignment with compliance.


• Scalable - Once a process consisting of a set of instructions is defined, the modules can be reused for other processes across other business areas.

Insurance industry is wide open for the implementation of RPA. If you look at any processes that are mundane and repetitive in nature that involve extracting information from one system or document and processing it in another then RPA could be a quick help in your transformation. These processes can simply be done by applying logic and no human thinking is involved like the intense underwriting process. Even there, RPA can help to a great extent. 

Some of the areas where you can think of a quick win are:

- Insurance servicing (Policy document sharing, change in benefits, address etc., )

- Email Support

- Agent desktop automation to transform your customer service team

Hello Diana,

We at BoticX Labs have helped and implemented at one of our Insurance clients covering the below processes:

New Policy: 

•One customer view (De-dup)

•Quote Generation

•KYC (Intelligent OCR)

•Group underwriting

•No claims bonus

Policy Servicing:

Group Policy – Fuzzy Match

Group policy servicing

Endorsement and policy support bot

Email support desk bot

Various recons.

Typically we simplify & automate processes (internal & external) to achieve Max RPA.

Happy to assist you with a POC and value realization.

Cheers,

Shailendra

Insurance, Banking and Financial Industry is a highly compliant driven industry, where compliance, security is the topmost priority.

Any solution devised, planned, implemented and executed should be looked at from a good lens of Compliance, Governance, Security of Data and Process.

Insurance Applications are time-bound and where these applications are behind firewalls and highly secure environments e.g. on-premise behind Citrix environments. 

So, any RPA solution should be able to automate the processes and the applications being used accordingly.

Time is very critical for processing a single transaction as most of these processes are matured over a period of time by the process executives when they execute these processes.

And for once, I see them executing the processes in a fraction of seconds.

2nd, there is a captive knowledge that has been gathered by the customer support executives or process executive/back office executives in terms of shortcuts and intelligent rules being understood by them to execute a single transaction. There is an implied knowledge that is not written or documented.

So any RPA solution should be trained intelligently to process these processes.

Lastly, at times the documentation is quite outdated, applications might be outdated or might have surpassed their shelf life in terms of process and technology chosen.

Any RPA solution should take care of working with these old technologies (terminal-based, console-driven applications being used) to automate the processes.

All in all, a good TIME and MOTION study and SIPOC documentation should help along with a good process mining tool to select the appropriate process for automation that gives the best value for money and ROI.

Please do ask specific questions or queries if you have any.

Hi Diana,

It's related with fast data processing, to help people on their daily tasks and by allowing the company to be more efficient.

The basis should be data collection and treatment with BI. You can't optimize what you are not measuring.

On the other hand with this approach, you are building the basis for priorization of the automatization projects and benefict measuring.

As you see the quick wins comming into place, people become more and more motivated, which is very important to promote adoption of automatization.

The technologies, can be real RPA software and can also be small improvements on current process, by automating an excel file or something similar.

For the insurance market specifically I see:

- Quotation automatically on the website or on call center.

- Portfolio analysis and tariff strategy to optimize profitability.

- Email dispatching / classification and distribution.

- Pro-active communication with clients.

- Others related with internal process.

Kind Regards,

Pedro Coelho

Hi, currently we are working RPA in an insurance company. One of the processes we're working to automate is auditing the parameters of the policy transactions being proactive not reactive. The other process  we're working with is doing the reconciliation process of the payments. We are using KRYON RPA platform.

Hello, We are dealing with huge volumes for Lloyd of London insurance process using Robotics. Could you please brief what is required.   

• Claim verification can be automated with rules


• Bots can deal with various data formats to extract relevant data (OCR)


• Rules can be changed with regulatory changes, without any need for training, immediately ensuring compliance.

Hello Diana,

Your entry is quite old, so I think your RPA way began already. But I received it just now.

I have been dealing with automation for more than ten years. I started from test automation which is the mother of RPA. Now I work in a company focused on insurance, banking, and financial industries, supporting such firms in business process automation.

All the above remarks are exciting and but one essential item is missing. I hope that you will find this note helpful.

What is missing is process optimization. What it means - it means before automating any process, you should identify and discover business processes in your company or business area as they are now (As Is), which does not decide how it should be done after automation (To Be). 

Moreover, automated processes are rare made the same way humans make them. Check the main process and tasks to be automated. It is also essential to check how automated processes will impact other operations and human work to avoid making something in the way that is optimizing and automating one process but destroying or slowing others.

Ther is a methodology to do it properly - it is called business process optimization. It sounds difficult? Perhaps but when you are doing it for the first time. There are several steps to take. In the end, you'll be confident that after implementing RPA, you, your team, and other people in the company and company itself will get valuable automated processes that can be scalable and work without errors.

When you have optimized processes, choose one that you know the best and make a PoC. If it will show the value you want to get, go ahead.

DM me if you will need any clarification 

I would encourage you to take a hybrid approach; that's really the best way to address the many issues mentioned below. 

However, RPA alone will not be the silver bullet. You'll need to think of Intelligent Automation leveraging multiple approaches.

Hi - we have successfully deployed UiPath for one client within Revenue Cycle Management, namely the Cash Application process. 

We're seeing close to 4-5X ROI. We are also helping another client automate the FNOL process with UiPath. Any process with high volume is a great target. 

Hello,

There are several business processes within the Insurance industry that can be considered for automation, using an RPA product. 

Automation Anywhere is one such leading RPA product. We are official business partners to Automation Anywhere (both implementation and support).

Thanks,

Venkat

Wow, this sounds like the perfect opportunity to use RPA, but only if it is done effectively, without frustrating the customer. If you can frame the questions they are asking with key words - as a human would do, then the RPA process should be able to respond with a more detailed questionnaire, or the exact answer.  Of course, there are going to be exceptions, and a process would be built to pass to a SME.  

Hallo Diana,
FastPath heeft diverse succesvolle oplossingen binnen volmacht en het intermediair actief. Waarbij het automatiseren van handmatige handelingen heeft geleid tot snellere bediening van de klant, benutten van potentie van mederwerkers, verbeteren van complaince en uiteraard efficiency.
We hebben er ook wat artikelen over geschreven:
https://fastpathautomation.com..., https://fastpathautomation.com...en via https://www.linkedin.com/compa...