September 1, 2022

Robotic Process Automation in Insurance: Top Benefits You Should Know

Insurance industry deals with loads of challenges that only automation can solve. With this article, we'll help you understand the role RPA in insurance can play. Read ahead, to learn more...

The insurance sector is a highly mature and regulated industry, making it challenging for new technologies to enter the market. However, digital transformation has brought about changes that can no longer be ignored. With the rise of artificial intelligence, natural language processing, and other exponential technologies, the insurance industry is beginning to see rapid advancements in unstructured data analysis and risk management processes.  Indeed, robotic process automation in insurance is one way that organizations can begin to leverage these new technologies to their advantage. This article will outline exactly what robotic process automation in insurance is and how it can be implemented.

What is RPA?

Robotic process automation (RPA) is a technology that automates business processes using metaphorical software robots (bots) or artificial intelligence (AI). It is sometimes referred to as "software robotics." In classic workflow automation systems, a software developer creates a list of steps to automate a process and interfaces with the back-end system using application programming interfaces (APIs). On the other hand, RPA systems automate operations by watching the user perform them directly in the GUI of the application. In this way, products that do not otherwise have APIs for automation can be made more accessible.

There are many similarities between RPA tools and graphical user interface testing tools in terms of technology. Generally, these tools automate interactions with graphical user interfaces by reproducing user demonstration actions. A RPA tool is different from other systems in that it allows data to be transferred between multiple applications, such as emailing an invoice, extracting its data, and then entering it into a bookkeeping program.

The Importance of Robotic Process Automation in Insurance

Using RPA, routine business operations can be automated, which helps workers save time, energy, and morale. The deployment of RPA bots across many systems can enhance accuracy and efficiency for insurers, freeing up human resources for more strategic tasks. In the financial industry, RPA deployments have shown up to a 200% return on investment within one year of implementation. There is a variety of old software and systems used by insurance firms. Insurers can use RPA to connect these diverse systems with minimal coding, resulting in faster operations, lower personal costs, and new innovations in business. By 2025, Gartner predicts that 70% of new enterprise apps will be created without coding.

Automation is proving to be a low-cost and quick way for companies in highly regulated industries, such as insurance and banking, to improve their compliance capabilities. In addition to getting better customer service, you also have more control over the process. For example, a business that receives many client inquiries can free up employees to handle more sophisticated inquiries. We require automation simply to alleviate the tension that it causes in companies. One online shop assesses RPA performance by the number of hours returned to the business. As a result, employees profit in addition to shareholders, senior management, and customers.

How does RPA Operate in the Insurance ndustry?

The first step in the insurance industry is claim processing. It necessitates corporations gathering enormous amounts of information from many sources, resulting in massive amounts of data. Current claims systems lack functionality and adaptability, and they have surpassed their practical limits, resulting in extensive human processing.  As a result, efficiency and flexibility have been hampered, slowing service and significantly impacting the customer experience. You can now see AI being heavily integrated into the claims management process in order to save processing time. 

Robotic process automation in insurance enables the integration of all claim processing information from various sources. In the context of the insurance industry, robotic process automation can automate manually intensive processes such as data extraction, complex error tracking, claim verification, integration of claim-relevant data sources, and more, thereby speeding up the process and creating a better customer experience. 

A risk assessment of the customer and exposure to risk is the next step in the underwriting process. To assess the risks associated with a policy, information is gathered from numerous sources. Scrambling data, analyzing it, and determining the hazards involved takes an average of 2-3 weeks.  Robotic Process Automation automates data collection from numerous external and internal sites, saving underwriters a great deal of time. Additionally, it can provide reports and recommendations while measuring run loss, automating the process used for underwriting and pricing products by populating numerous fields in internal systems.

Creating audit trails and documenting activities in the insurance industry is subject to strict rules. There has never been a time when insurance industry regulation has been more intense. As insurance processes become more time-consuming and error-prone, the chances of regulatory violations increase. Businesses benefit from automation by eliminating the need to spend large resources manually enforcing regulatory compliance, thereby improving regulatory processes. The use of robotic process automation in insurance can automate processes such as verifying existing customer information, generating regulatory reports, and sending out account closure notices.

The only way insurance firms can improve and provide better service to their consumers is to measure what they do. It is challenging to track and measure operational efficiency and identify areas for improvement because of the number of operational and paper-intensive activities. Robotic process automation in Insurance enables tracking of tasks completed by software robots without requiring manual effort, and the number of transactions and exceptions encountered can be measured easily without requiring manual efforts. In addition to improving process efficiency, RPA's audit trail assists with regulatory compliance. This improves claim response times, customer service, and application simplicity for customers. Policy administration connects all of an insurer's functions, from quoting, rating, and underwriting to delivering consumer services. Current policy administration systems, which have been in place for decades, are costly and time-consuming to maintain. They are unable to scale quickly enough to satisfy increasing client demand or to support business expansion. While existing management softwares and systems have saved us a significant amount of time and labor, they have also introduced substantial navigation via many programs, which has resulted in operational inefficiency.

By using robotic process automation in insurance, everyone in any process or silo can simply complete a wide range of tasks without requiring extensive system navigation. Automated accounting, settlements, risk management, credit control, taxation, and regulatory compliance. It is common for insurance back-office activities to be time-consuming, repetitive, and operationally intensive. With an RPA implementation, a company can free up 20-30% of its capacity, improve customer experience, and reduce operational risks.

The Advantages of Robotic Process Automation in Insurance

Insurers can use RPA to improve back-office procedures and customer-facing services, as well as alter the work environment. Employees shouldn't have to input useless data.

Insurers can benefit from RPA by implementing the following:

Improved Insurance Claim Processing: 

Traditionally, staff acquire information from various documents and enter it into other systems. RPA bots can now move enormous volumes of claims data with a single click, allowing clients to receive a speedier response when filing a claim.

Improved Customer Satisfaction: 

RPA allows insurers to accelerate a wide range of data-rich activities, from new business onboarding to policy cancellations. RPA can navigate numerous systems and move data automatically, saving time and satisfying the needs of consumers.

Cost Savings are Achieved Quickly:

RPA is an excellent approach to streamlining business operations while increasing productivity and lowering overall costs. Furthermore, businesses can reallocate teams to higher priority tasks, resulting in increased business growth.

A Higher Degree of Accuracy in Data Collection:

By using RPA to replace manual operations, insurers can eliminate the possibility of human error. RPA improves data dependability, which is particularly crucial for regulatory compliance.

Investment Protection: 

It is possible to extend the life of legacy systems by using robots instead of replacing them every few years and then modifying these systems to fit with modern systems afterward. Traditional IT initiatives may take much longer to set up than these initiatives.

Improved Job Satisfaction: 

RPA bots use intelligent document processing to eliminate a wide range of manual data entry jobs, allowing people to focus on higher-value activities. This raises morale throughout the organization.

Opportunities for Cross-Selling: 

With RPA tools like chatbots, consumers can receive personalized product recommendations. Additionally, RPA can be used to create new business ideas like instantaneous life insurance and on-demand property insurance.

Registration Form:

In the insurance industry, form registration is a redundant but required process. RPA can automate and aid process completion in 40% of the time necessary, with half the personnel.

Cancellation of Policy:

Many transactional tasks are involved in policy cancellation, such as calculating the cancellation date, start date, insurance terms, and so on. Policy cancellation can be completed in one-third the time with RPA in insurance.

Distribution and Sales:

RPA can simplify the difficult and frightening task of selling and distributing insurance. It is possible to automate and implement processes such as creating sales scorecards, sending notifications to agents, and performing legal, compliance, and credit checks.

Accountancy and Finance:

Automating tasks such as clicking, typing, pressing buttons, filling out templates, pasting information, and filling out fields. With RPA systems, substantial amounts of bank reconciliations can be automated, reducing transactional and policy costs.

Legacy Application Integration:

Since legacy apps are strongly intertwined with insurance firms' business operations, deploying ERPs or BPM systems is extremely difficult. Insurance businesses can easily integrate RPA into their existing workflows, and a well-planned RPA implementation can work with any system.

Scalability:

An important advantage of robotic process automation in insurance is its scalability, since an insurance organization can install as many software bots as necessary. Additionally, RPA bots can be rolled back at no additional cost!

The most critical factor to consider is strategy. Automation can be used tactically to save money. However, using RPA as a broader strategic tool yields even more benefits. That is the first. The second point is about the launch. You must include the C-suite, hire an excellent project champion, and select the appropriate procedure. It must be consistent, mature, optimized, rule-based, repeatable, and typically high-volume. Begin by doing a controlled experiment on a visible bottleneck or pain point.

It is also important to consider change management, which involves convincing the firm to accept automation. From the beginning, it is a crucial issue. Developing sophisticated enterprise RPA capabilities is the fourth step. Over time, long-term users establish centers of excellence, usually in business operations, and develop skills and capacities within them. The company has employees who examine the feasibility of business unit proposals. People are responsible for setting up, installing, and creating robots, while controllers operate them and arrange their work in harmony with human tasks. In addition to continuously improving, they have a strong understanding of security, governance, and IT. Now is probably a good time for organizations to establish their centers of excellence for RPA. They have expertise in continuous improvement, governance, and security. The organizations that implement RPA now should probably consider establishing a center of excellence as soon as possible.

Stages for Choosing the Best Tool for your Needs

With so many tools on the market, deciding which one is the finest is a difficult task. The stages to choosing the ideal tool include thoroughly analyzing your requirements and then locating the greatest fit based on those requirements.

To Determine the Scope

One of the most common types of bots is the automated bot, which helps automate repetitive, time-consuming, and rule-based processes. Robotic process automation in insurance services works best when it is deployed in repetitive, rule-based, and human-free operations, such as form registration, customer onboarding, underwriting, pricing, etc. Consider the following when deciding the scope: Will the task be repetitive? Does it follow a standardized process? Do humans need to be involved? Does this task save time for employees? Does this task have a high volume? Identify which tasks fall into each category. With RPA in insurance, employee productivity, customer satisfaction, and data quality can all be enhanced. As a result, personnel can take on more critical tasks that take advantage of their interpersonal communication skills.

Create a Plan for Scaling it Across Teams within the Organization

Scaling across the corporation is the inevitable next step after the robotic work has been mechanized. When your employees are well-trained, they have more leeway to think imaginatively about ways to increase the company's efficiency and customer service. All team members should be involved in the collaborative testing and decision-making process in order to increase the adoption of new technology. In insurance, RPA is intended to help employees, not replace them. Throughout this step, chart out the RPA tools and map them against the following feature sets.

It is Important to Train your Entire Workforce

More personnel must use robotic process automation in insurance services in order to reap the greatest benefits from its implementation. As a result, once the technology is integrated into your systems, ensure that your whole workforce, including IT, customer service, tech, and others, are taught to use it on a regular basis.

Allow Data-Driven Decisions to be Made

It is possible to make large-scale data-driven decisions with robotic process automation. It is common for humans to overlook computation, validation, and data integration tasks for insurance services. To make better decisions, insurers can use RPA bots to gather data from multiple sources into a unified view.  Employees can benefit from software robots since they can analyze more data points. Due to this, data is being used creatively and in new ways. This will result in more accurate and precise decisions.

VisionERA - IDP in Insurance Services

With VisionERA, enterprises can automate every part of document processing through a workflow-based, intelligent document processing software without writing a line of code. VisionERA automates customer onboarding, KYC verification, invoice processing, credit underwriting, and approvals for leading banks across the globe. With VisionERA, there is no learning curve. The platform is simple and intuitive. Basically any tech stack can incorporate it easily since it is simply incorporated.

Insurance claim automation is becoming increasingly vital, and one of the next critical considerations is identifying the best automation option. VisionERA IDP , unlike other IDP systems, is designed with cutting-edge proprietary technology such as artificial intelligence, deep learning, computer vision, natural language processing, and so on. These technologies improve productivity, scalability, and flexibility while also speeding up the processing process. Enterprises can profit from improved automation capabilities by combining human and artificial intelligence. 

Conclusion 

There are many reasons why firms should consider VisionERA's IDP technology. The scanning of documents can be automated to save time and money. It can also help you increase the accuracy and readability of documents by extracting key data. In addition, it can help you better manage your data by automatically classifying and arranging it based on predefined criteria. Look no further than VisionERA if you need a solid document processing solution. The system is continually updated for upcoming concerns using a continuous feedback learning method. It can also be totally customized to match your own business requirements. Using VisionERA shortens and eliminates lengthy claim processing time.

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