AI-Driven Insurtech Platform – Need of the hour for the insurance industry
Insurance, one of the oldest industries in India, was lacking in technology for many decades. Even now the insurance industry is falling short in terms of technology-driven solutions in many processes such as Underwriting, Claims, Customer onboarding, Product management, Distribution, etc. The current systems lack products with personalized premiums, benefits, and coverages too. Thereby automating them with the state of the art technology equipped with capable knowledge is best.
On the other hand, the biggest target audience for the Insurance companies, the young population, and the new-age customer base is tech-savvy and is looking for instant and efficient solutions at the fingertips. The insurers are being compelled to deploy digital methods to keep up with customer expectations. Hence, we can make out that the landscape has been rapidly changing towards innovative ideas and pro-technology approaches in the last few years. Digital technologies are causing paradigm shifts in the insurance industry.
In this digital disruption era, the industry’s emphasis is moving towards the integration of innovative technologies with the help of insurtech to transform the age-old processes and improve overall efficiencies, by advancement in technologies and in knowledge grasping powers. Innovative digital solutions are no longer a luxury, it has become an essential need for the insurance industry both in profit and at serviceable too. Simultaneously, we can see there are a lot of technological advances happening through various insurtech start-ups in India.
In underwriting despite technological advances, almost 70% of the information flow is manual. The profiling of the insured and underwriting decisions are still far away from considering & assessing all the aspects of an individual. The social, environmental, habits & activity, etc data has to be considered along with financial and medical data. New age underwriting systems are using a lot of APIs for OCR/ICR as well as to collect data from various sources such as social media (Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Instagram, etc.), Financial institutes (Banks, ITO, etc.), Environmental information/assessment providers such as AQI, Govt websites such as police records, Cowin data for vaccination, Data from the activity trackers and wearable devices, etc. This information helps in assessing the insured and preparing his overall risk profile from the Insurance point of view. The best option is to have an underwriting tool with integrated APIs as well as AIML. It helps in Smart automated underwriting which gets trained by the rules on its own over the period and helps in predicting the probability of early claims. AI-driven smart underwriting systems help in saving cost, efforts, and time and increase profitability in the long run.
The lack of innovative future-ready systems holds for the claims process too. Claims processing is still highly dependent on manual data entry for SOCs/Tariffs and feeding the case information at the time of claims. The smart AI-driven claims processing platform is a need of the hour. These tools help in the automation of adjudication of the claims and reduce the TAT to a few minutes. This positively impacts customer satisfaction and retention. The availability of SOCs/tariffs in digitized format and relevant information from crucial sources such as police records through APIs help in preparing the profile of the claimant whereas the AIML supports smart decisions based on the earlier claim’s history and overall risk profile at the time of underwriting.
Technologies being and acting as an essential part of the current era making the customers and organizations go forward with advancement and also making it hassle-free for their services as well as products. These AIML drove and API-enabled smart systems by Insurtech start-ups are available for various other processes such as product designing and distribution, lead management, customer onboarding especially for digital distributors, corporate/group policy management, etc.
The insurance industry is expected to evolve over the next few years to use these smart tools to reduce manual intervention and provide high-quality services at a real fast pace as expected by the young population.
Author: Abhijeet Kanetkar, Chief Business Officer, Artivatic.ai
Disclaimer: The opinions expressed within this article are the personal opinions of the author. The facts and opinions appearing in the article do not reflect the views of IIA and IIA does not assume any responsibility or liability for the same.