by
June 24, 2022
Insurance is a multifaceted industry dealing with insurances of various types. The one thing common across industry verticals are the multiple use cases, numerous paperwork to process, and unstructured data. This blog will shed light on the different industry verticals within insurance, most common paperwork used, and a relevant solution for document processing automation.
As per LIMRA in 2020, over 70% of the U.S. citizens said they will apply for life insurance in the coming future. This figure is expected to increase with the coming years as there is a huge section of people that is interested in insuring different facets of their life such as health, life, property, travel, etc. This has opened a lot more business opportunities for the insurance industry.
Insurance companies, due to their complex procedures are in fear of causing revenue leaks are still stuck with their legacy system to handle the computation and processing. In most cases, the document processing is all done manually by a team of document controllers.
While this has worked well for them, the new age clients have set a high bar for customer experience. Companies who are successful in delivering a stellar customer experience have claimed themselves the lion share of the market.
These companies have identified the need to make changes in their processes so they start adopting AI based systems replacing legacy systems one by one. They are using AI based system to -
In this article, we will walk you through one of those processes - Automation of Document processing.
But sadly, even today, the industry is stuck with old traditional ways of document processing that are slow, inefficient, error prone, and cost intensive.
However, some far sighted organizations in the insurance sector have now started digitizing and automating documentation processes that can in turn help them perform faster, better while helping them meet deadlines on time.
While there are several solutions available in the market, an Intelligent Document Processing(IDP) platform can prove to be a boon for the insurance companies.
It is a technology backed AI technologies such as natural language processing (NLP), computer vision, deep learning, etc that makes it capable of capturing information from documents – often regardless of its format or language i.e. unstructured data. Aside to data capture, it also gives the benefit of data verification and storage.
IDP is a popular alternative to manual data extraction. It is because of its capability to process huge volumes of documents at one go and that too of unstructured. It can process documents far quicker and in bulk than any human can – no matter if the data originates from an electronic system, or a physical source. With IDP, organizations can even process handwritten documents and checkboxes. It also makes them capable of applying logic for extracting usable information from raw documents.
The outcome of using IDP, for many companies, is that it increases productivity and efficiency in processes that directly and indirectly deal with document data. In fact, these platforms can even integrate with third-party applications and frameworks such as Salesforce, mongoDB, oracle, Microsoft Dynamics, UiPath, etc using APIs. The platforms can also export data either in forms of spreadsheets, or feed it directly to any downstream application such as CRM, CMS, ERP, etc.
Insurance has multiple use cases for document processing catering to multiple industry verticals. It includes:
And the list goes on! However, with the help of IDP, a majority of manual document processing work can be automated with ease. One simply needs to set up a custom workflow, and run.
The system would automatically pick all the redundancies over time and ask for manual reconciliation. Once the reconciliations are done, even the rejected cases are automated for future.
Challenges demanding document automation…
The variety of documents aggregated in each of these use cases deals with data that is heavily unstructured. This leads to the failure of traditional methods such as manual processing and OCR for documentation purposes.
It is because manual processing is time consuming & expensive while OCRs are incapable of processing unstructured documents. To bridge this gap, companies would often outsource their manual document processing work but it offers less control and is expensive. Also today, it is a lot harder to recruit a data entry operator considering the upcoming masses don't consider it as a plausible career.
Aside from this, there are major concerns for the insurance industry as mentioned in a forbes article such as:
Insurance industry has always relied on data-driven decisions, however, the challenge is that still most of the data is present in physical form. This creates barriers for insurance organizations asking them to employ systems such as IDP that can process physical data faster. In fact in a PwC report it is mentioned that almost 90% of insurance industries CEOs say they rely on customer data for understanding their preference. To address this situation, big organizations such as KPMGs are partnering with small innovative firms. In fact, even AmyGB has partnered with Microsoft to provide technology solutions with their IDP platform ‘VisionERA’.
Why IDP?...
Having an Intelligent Document Processing platform can tremendously improve the overall efficiency and TAT (turnaround time) for a process completion. Also, the current market that is driven by customer experience and satisfaction can be realized with faster approvals and claims settlement via an IDP platform.
Adding to it, IDP aids in digitization that facilitates better management and storage of data. Also, issues such as lost data, incorrect data, misspelled data, etc are capably handled using a document automation solution such as an IDP. It makes for bulk processing that helps reduce both manual and cognitive overload.
All of the above creates a dire need for the insurance industry to choose a document automation platform. It will not only optimize the documentation process but will also save additional time and cost spent for operations.
The insurance industry is divided into multiple verticals. Here is a list consolidating some of them and the most common documents used within:
It is often known as the most document intensive vertical in the insurance industry as health insurance processes go through a variety of procedures such as quoting, onboarding, underwriting, claims processing, etc.
It is difficult to assess these within the deadline considering the amount of documents that are processed. Also, even though the industry has crossed leaps and bounds in terms of modern policy making, and claims workflow, they still lag in terms of document processing.
To mitigate that, document data extraction and verification can be automated using an Intelligent Document Processing platform as it can speed up the process by leaps and bounds.
Auto insurance primarily covers two liabilities i.e. bodily damage and property damage. Bodily damage refers to the damage caused to individuals i.e. another driver, passenger, pedestrians, etc.
On the other hand, property damage deals with damage caused to the property during the accidents. Adding to it, auto insurance also offers a variety of different coverages such as uninsured motorist coverage, personal injury protection, collision coverage, etc.
It makes up for loads of unstructured data that is difficult to comprehend with both manual processing and OCRs. This thereby refers to the dire need of a document automation solution such as an IDP platform for auto insurance which not only makes the work faster but also reduces errors during data extraction and verification.
Life insurance is offered primarily in two ways i.e. term insurance and permanent insurance. Term life insurance is for a specific number of years while permanent life insurance lasts for life time and offers a designated cash value component.
Besides this, life insurances are offered to people in various different plans to choose from. These are whole life insurance, variable life insurance, indexed universal life insurance, group life insurance, etc. Each of these types of life insurances make up for huge piles of unstructured data that requires processing.
A study by investopedia states that almost half of the Americans faced travel losses during traveling in 2021. Also, out of these numbers 34% were more likely to invest in travel insurance, especially traveling abroad. It points towards another huge market in the insurance sector.
There are multiple types of travel coverage offered by insurance companies such as trip cancellation, baggage loss, short-term and major medical coverage, etc. Acquiring customers and providing insurance for travel requires a bunch of documents for onboarding as well as claims processing.
It makes up for data that is heavily unstructured in nature demanding a smart document processing solution. An IDP with its capabilities can be the right solution to do the job.
Yet, before extrapolating the prowess of an IDP platform, it is better to understand the different verticals associated with insurance, what are the most common documents used, and what an IDP platform can do for this sector.
VisionERA is the latest entry in the IDP space. It offers tons of great features aside from its impeccable capabilities of processing unstructured documents for data extraction and verification in the insurance industry.
Loaded with compelling features such as contextual data correction, handwritten document data extraction, industry beating table detection system, plug-n-play, etc. It is a one-stop solution that promises to handle each and every insurance document with impeccable accuracy. It can be easily installed within an existing legacy infrastructure in both an EDGE-based architecture or cloud. This provides the freedom of potentially improving the existing infrastructure in an insurance organization without making tremendous changes.
It sorts, segregates, and categorizes the insurance document data before providing the final output in the format of an excel or CSV file enabling it to be more search savvy and contextualized for future usage.
Adding to it, VisionERA can easily integrate with any content management system used by your organization. It also offers a smart insights board that also provides KPIs to understand the redundancies in different insurance departments.
Backed by proprietary technologies such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, natural language processing, and computer vision, the platform makes for a complete document processing system that is intuitive and cognitive while operational. It will make sure that the insurance workflows improve day-by-day and provide the highest level of optimization and accuracy.
VisionERA can be the future of the insurance industry, helping them reduce manual work load and realize deadlines faster without hiccups. It can dramatically reduce the time and cost for claims processing, reduce TAT, figure out fraud, improve subrogation recovery rate, and a lot more.
Insurance is a vast industry catering to different facets of requirements. It comes through a variety of processes such as customer onboarding, audits, claims processing, etc. increasing its complexity. It direly requires an automated document processing solution that can empower them with the burden of huge volumes of data extraction and verification work. It’ll allow them necessary bandwidth to perform core operation and fasten closing multiple cases.
Note: Now you can insure document processing for your insurance documentation? As of now, you can procure VisionERA at just $0 for your organization. Want to learn about the terms and conditions, click on the link here.
To try out VisionERA by yourself, simply try our free trial!
To get a guided demonstration from our team for your use cases, schedule a demo at your convenience.