Automated Sales & Underwriting Strategies Can Transform Insurance
Implications and Impact of Covid on the Insurance Industry
As the world witnessed unemployment, lockdowns, travel bans, and business interruptions, economies came to a grinding halt in different geographies.
One of the major repercussions of the COVID-19 pandemic in financial sectors has been the increase in awareness about insurable risks across categories and markets.
Many of the underlying processes in insurance that had already started evolving due to the adoption of digital and intelligent automation across functions have scaled substantially in the post-COVID world. As face-to-face contact, physical offices, physical audits, and ancillary processes remain severely constrained, insurers are poised at the tipping point to embrace digital transformation.
Increased Role of Automation and AI in Sales & Underwriting
With direct selling becoming obsolete, salespeople must fall back on digital channels, backed by a robust automated underwriting process. From underwriting processes that typically involved manual effort (in gathering data from documents), enterprises have now shifted to automation with a digital core that can make it easier to analyze several types of data formats — textual, visual, sensor-based, and electronic. The automated process can then be used to parse structured and unstructured data sources such as IoT data, claims data, physical proofs, social data, life health data, etc. It is then possible to arrive at actionable insights without human intervention and the risk of human errors. The more data an underwriter has at his disposal, the more accurately he will be able to assess risk.
It won’t be unfair to say the entire lifecycle of Sales & Underwriting is now powered by AI. ML helps to narrow down options and build detailed customer profiles/historical behavior analyses. For the critical steps of risk and exposure determination, insurers are banking on automated risk grade classification, authority, and appetite checks based on underwriting guidelines. Risk impact can be estimated using OCR/CV/NLP, etc. At the final stages of pricing optimization and quote generation, automation can recommend rates along with the application and risk summary, while simultaneously identifying and offering cross-sell and upsell opportunities.
Encouraged by new-found abilities, insurers may find it advantageous to explore new products, markets, sources, and formats of data. Underwriters will be able to devote more time to evaluate risk and contribute more productively to the bottom line.
Originally published in the Bridgei2i Official Website.
