Why Robotics Process Automation is Ideal for the Insurance Industry?

Imagine this: You submit a fresh application to an insurance company, and the company automatically completes your underwriting process and activate your insurance policy in 48 hours. All this without you and the company getting involved in multiple backend processes which are monotonous and time-consuming.

Insurance companies have come a long way in the past decade, and are leaving no stone unturned to provide every possible facility to their customers. Emerging technologies riding the digital wave, such as Robotics Process Automation (RPA), are playing a significant role in how the insurance industry shapes up—becoming more efficient and fastidiously focused on customers experience.  

According to a recent report by MarketsandMarkets, the robotic process automation market is estimated to be worth $2,467 million by 2022, at a CAGR of 30.14% between 2017 and 2022. The chief driver of this surge in demand is the ease of deploying robotic process automation with traditional business processes or legacy systems as the technology is non-intrusive.

Here are a few areas where the insurance companies have seen significant benefits after using the RPA technology:  

• Claims Registration: The time for claims registration process reduces by atleast 50% after RPA solution implementation. Contact centers also save time to register and update each claim.  
• Credit Note Refund: Overall time and cost for credit note refunds improve with RPA implementation. Processing time reduces to 1/5th to achieve the same throughput with 1/4th of the staff.  
• Approval for Credit Note Refunds: With RPA implementation, the credit note approval process reduces the manpower requirement by 75% and improves the service delivery efficiency by up to 50%.  
• Cancellation of Policies: The cancellation process improves massively. After RPA solution is implemented, companies take 1/3rd time to cancel insurance policy.  
• Forms Registration: More forms are registered and there is 40% improvement in the output with 50% staff. 
• NCD (No Claims Discount) Verification: Manual NCD validation usually takes up to 10 minutes. However, with the help of bots, verification and flag mismatch can be carried out in only 2 minutes.  
• Policy Issuance: Manual task of policy issuance may take over a week’s time for successful completion. After the implementation, companies take less than 2 days to issue policies.

Opportunities for insurance

Although, RPA offers immense business value, all processes of your enterprise are not suitable for automation. All the processes involved in Insurance have following characteristics which are best fit for RPA:

• Access multiple systems  
• Use unambiguous rules  
• Are prone to human errors  
• Have restricted human intervention  
• Deal with high-volume transactions  
• Require minimal exceptional handling  
• Are repetitive in nature  
• Result in significant workload  
• Involve menial sub-activities or processes

While there are several uses of RPA in the insurance industry, automating these processes will allow your workforce to utilize their skills better and focus on resolving complex tasks to increase business value.  

Improving Business with Bots  

RPA applications enhance productivity levels, reduce operational costs, provide growth opportunities, and increase business efficiency. The insurance companies can achieve these goals if they are able to easily collect policyholder’s details, get hold of previous years’ claims documents as well other relevant data to arrive at a wise decision of settling insurance claims.

Additionally, RPA also has an impact on back-end operations and other non-core business functions of the insurance industry. RPA bots can help customers in the following functions:

• Download policyholder data from multiple sources  
• Scan and read data  
• Data entry into key systems  
• Verify insurance period  
• Flag errors/mismatch in data  
• Provide quick approvals  
• Generate follow-up alerts  
• Compile data from multiple systems  
• Provide 360° view of data available with customer support staff  

RPA and Insurance: A perfect match  

In the insurance industry, back-office operations need to be highly efficient. Hence, there is an increasing need for adoption of RPA in the industry to automate high-volume and time-consuming operational activities.

RPA automation is enabling insurance providers fight challenges, and achieve growth and competitive edge in the long run. They are now fully compliant to regulatory standards and achieved enhanced levels of customer service with RPA implementation.

Due to RPA flexibility and technology advancements, the adoption in the insurance industry has become prominent and inevitable. In the coming years, RPA will become an essential tool for insurance companies to stay ahead and lead the pack.   

Finding Strategic Partners  

Kellton is a RPA solution provider with a dedicated team of architects, business analysts, and RPA specialists. We help clients achieve almost 70% reduction in time spent in performing transactions, while also reducing effort spent on various monotonous tasks.