Insurance Technology
Article | August 9, 2022
Through machine learning and deep learning, artificial intelligence (AI) can meet industry expectations.
As artificial intelligence becomes more deeply embedded in the insurance industry, industry leaders must position themselves to respond to the changing business landscape. Every day,various factors contribute to the industry's changing landscape. AI is becoming more assertive in insurance, particularly in cost savings, customer service and experience, product innovations, and marketing initiatives.
With this understanding, market leaders can develop appropriate revenue-generating strategies, embrace new AI horizons and implement them to develop the perspective required to succeed in the futuristic insurance industry.
AI-related Action for Better Forecasting
Among insurance executives who have already invested in AI, many new businesses are reaping significant benefits. They have gained the advantages of using AI to improve the customer experience (CX). According to a Deloitte study, approximately 65% believe AI assists in decision-making. Furthermore, according to PwC specialists working with insurers on AI initiatives, businesses are increasingly using AI to:
Customize products and services for consumers and other businesses
Establish a loyalty framework and upsell among customers
Automate more data from social media and other sources for better forecasting
Automate more aspects of claim processing
Improve fraud detection methods
Beginwith customer segmentation to target
As a result of these findings, AI investments will benefit insurance companies more than ever before.
How Insurers Can Accelerate AI
The following points can help insurance businesses accelerate AI and achieve faster ROI.
Centralize Business Functionalities
Deploying AI into the process aids in the automation of resources, the alignment of tasks, the use of analytics to nurture data, the improvement of governance, and the scaling of solutions.
Focus On Data
AI in insurance aids in collectingand combining relevant data from consumers and future customers. AI-assisted data collection is faster and more accurate at the appropriate time. In this manner, marketers can plan for future marketing campaigns that will increase engagement and bring in more money.
Reduced Risks
AI is the most effective at reducing business risks. Also, AI works best for insurers to minimize risks such as data breaches, fraud detection, correct cost segmentation, and budgeting hazards.
Some Insights into AI Investment: A Key Decision to Make!
As technology continues to empower the insurance sector, let's take a look at how other insurance companies are investing in AI so that you may make the vital decision to incorporate AI into your organization as soon as possible.
65% of businesses found better ways to establisha customer experience base with the help of AI post-2020
49% of businesses have improved their internal decision-making process after adopting AI
56% of businesses were able to reinvent their products and services through AI
47% of businesses operated their business functions more efficiently with AI and increased productivity.
45% of insurance businesses saved substantial costs using AI algorithms
35% ofinsurance businesses have successfully reduced risks associated with their businesses after the deployment of AI.
53% of insurance companies have seen a significant revenue increase by incorporating AI into their processes.
These figures are based on a Deloitte’s research study conducted by insurance industry specialists worldwide.
Some Possible AI Risks for Businesses
Every technology helps businesses gain benefits, but technology installation has to be done correctly to avoid consequences. As a result, insurance companies must exercise caution when implementing AI in their business processes. The possibility of faulty AI implementation could lead to:
New cyber hazards
New privacy threats
Workforce shortages
New legal liabilities and reputational risks
Customer distrust
More complex business modules
The lack of AI abilitiesismore challenging, which can affect the entire business sphere, especially the functions that are associated with AI.
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Insurance Technology
Article | July 13, 2022
In the insurance industry, artificial intelligence (AI) has become a buzzword. Nonetheless, despite the fact that we are still in the early stages of AI implementation, the industry has made significant progress.
The Need for AI in Insurance
Insurance is a long-established and highly regulated industry. Perhaps as a result, insurance companies have been slower to adopt technological change than other industries. Insurance is still dominated by manual, paper-based processes that are time-consuming and necessitate human intervention. Even today, customers must deal with time-consuming paperwork and bureaucracy when filing a claim or enrolling in a new insurance policy. Customers may also pay more for insurance if policies are not tailored to their specific needs. Insurance is not always a pleasant customer experience in an age when most of our daily activities are online, digitized, and convenient.
Having said that, we are beginning to see a global push by insurance companies to enhance their technological capabilities in order to do business faster, cheaper, and more securely. There have been several notable examples of insurers investing heavily in Artificial Intelligence solutions in recent years.
If AI technology is fully applied to the insurance industry, McKinsey estimates a potential annual value of up to $1.1 trillion.
How are insurers implementing AI?
There are numerous examples of insurers around the world using AI to improve both their bottom line and the customer experience. There are also a slew of start-ups offering AI solutions to insurers and customers. I'll discuss a few interesting cases here.
The Future of Artificial Intelligence in Insurance
AI has the potential to transform customers' insurance experiences from frustrating and bureaucratic to quick, on-demand, and more affordable. Customized insurance products will attract more customers at lower costs. If insurers apply AI technology to the mountain of data at their disposal, we will soon see more flexible insurance, such as on-demand pay-as-you-go insurance and premiums that adjust automatically in response to accidents, customer health, and so on.
Insurance will become more personalized as insurers use AI technology to better understand what their customers require. By accelerating workflows, insurers will be able to save money. They will also discover new revenue streams as artificial intelligence-driven analysis uncovers new business and cross-selling opportunities.
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Insurance Technology
Article | July 20, 2022
The COVID-19 pandemic has caused unprecedented disruption to the insurance industry overall, dramatically curtailing business activity, upending the everyday lives of employees and customers, and more. However, companies that derive a substantial portion of their business from motor insurance have enjoyed stronger bottom-line results during the pandemic than in previous years. That’s because when sudden lockdowns kept drivers at home and off the road (see exhibit), claims plunged by 60 to 80 percent almost immediately. As restrictions began to lift, claim volumes subsequently bounced back, although they remain 20 to 30 percent lower than they were before the pandemic. The corresponding drop in payouts for claims was only partially offset by the refunds on premiums that insurers paid to customers to compensate them for traveling fewer miles.
Are motor claims in Europe about to rebound?
As of mid-2021, motor claims volume remains suppressed—at least for the time being. For insurers, this offers a short-term window to pursue or accelerate strategic initiatives aimed at establishing claims excellence, a key driver of profitability. These initiatives include transforming claims processes to improve customer experience, building digital capabilities, leveraging advanced analytics to improve decision-making, and reducing long-standing sources of leakage. Acting now will help insurers be prepared when vaccination rates across Europe accelerate, economies reopen, and both mobility and motor claims rebound.
Even as the pandemic recedes and business returns, insurers are likely to confront three persistent challenges that can be addressed—at least in part—by transforming claims management to improve profitability.
Top-line pressure will continue. Pandemic-related top-line pressure will likely continue for the foreseeable future. If history serves as a guide, commercial lines, which suffered from a temporary halt in business activity in the tourism, aviation, entertainment, and local business sectors, may be slow to recover. During the 2008 financial crisis, for instance, commercial lines took significantly longer to recover than personal lines. As for personal lines today, declines in everyday commuting have altered customers’ perceptions of the value of insurance: if they drive less, they expect to pay less. As noted above, some insurers have proactively offered their customers premium paybacks for reduced car usage—a change that could endure.
Digital is here to stay. Because of the pandemic, people shifted many everyday activities to remote channels and adopted new digital tools. For example, across Europe, 60 to 70 percent of consumers moved some of their shopping online, and most intend to perpetuate the new habit after the pandemic ends. This shift in customer behavior extended to engagement with insurers. In the United Kingdom, claims notifications filed via digital channels doubled during the pandemic, and insurers received 30 percent more digital inquiries than in the past. However, customers’ growing expectations for an end-to-end digital experience—with 24/7 service, instant feedback, and a user-friendly interface—still place most insurers in the position of playing catch-up. The large majority of customers still prefer to place a call rather than use digital self-service; in Europe, for example, more than 50 percent of claims are initiated when a customer contacts an agent. This preference could indicate that insurers have yet to fully digitize the claims handling process.
Inflation will affect claims costs. Insurers anticipate increased pressure on claims costs from multiple sources. First, car repair shops have suffered the knock-on effects of the COVID-19-induced drop in claims volume. Many received government help, but they also responded by increasing labor rates and margins on spare parts. The claims inflation rate currently sits at 4 to 5 percent. Ongoing cost pressure means repair shops are unlikely to reinstate their pre-COVID-19 price levels without some restructuring in the sector. In one scenario, insurers could step into the role of ecosystem orchestrators, significantly consolidating repair volumes and offering strong incentives—including extending insurance services to include maintenance and offering negotiated prices for parts and labor—to repair shops to participate. Meanwhile, insurers can analyze increased volumes of claims data to continually assess the performance of repair shops and then use those insights to guide customers to the best deals.
Even before the pandemic, insurers had made strides in improving the bottom line by increasing productivity and optimizing technical excellence, particularly via pricing. Now is the time to tackle claims. Claims organizations can use this period of lower claims volume to plan their strategic investments in advanced analytics transformation, to devise new digital talent strategies, and to improve their understanding of customer needs and expectations.
A complete suite of analytics and updated process automation—prerequisites for accurate, end-to-end automation—constitute the backbone of the new claims and customer experience model. The tools are evolving, driving automated decision-making along the entire claims handling process: routing, triaging, liability negotiation, cost estimating, deciding to repair or write off damaged vehicles, cash settlements, and fraud detection. All these areas will increasingly use digital and analytics as opposed to manual labor, changing the entire claims operating model.
Responding to customer demands for a seamless claims experience is a top priority. The pandemic has proved that customers are eager for and accepting of new digital experiences. They expect full transparency throughout the claims journey; minimal effort on their part (for example, very little engagement back and forth with the agent to get the claim resolved and receive payment); faster resolution of claims, perhaps including automated payments; and the ability to move seamlessly between the digital and physical worlds.
Furthermore, insurers can work to reduce leakage and improve the bottom line. Leakage takes many forms, including replacing rather than repairing a vehicle, offering a luxury replacement vehicle rather than a car that matches the customer’s vehicle class, and incurring costs for in-person loss assessments even in obvious cases for which pictures would suffice. Tackling leakage will entail enabling efficient detection of anomalies, selecting claims for detailed review, and empowering the claims organizations to efficiently close claims that cast no doubt.
Accomplishing these critical objectives will entail a shift from a scattered and often siloed approach using unintegrated digital and analytics tools to end-to-end digital- and analytics-enabled claims processes. On the front end, insurers will need to establish tools on par with the top digital services their customers use every day (for example, ride-hailing apps, social media, and digital banks).
On the back end, claims organization will need to invest in a suite of analytics engines to support automated decision-making to cut costs. The opportunity starts with claims prevention—using telematics and the Internet of Things to issue safety warnings and damage prevention tips—and continues throughout the claims processing journey, from providing customers with an easy digital first notice of loss interface and improving claims cost accuracy, to digital selection of a repair shop and automated payment processing and invoice checks. This relative lull in activity also gives insurers a good time to provide teams handling claims with the training they need to learn new processes and operate new digital tools.
Claims are already rebounding, so the clock is ticking for insurers. Building end-to-end digital and analytics solutions requires significant investment and will take substantial time. For claims organizations, it is critical to act now or risk missing the opportunity to emerge from the pandemic stronger than competitors.
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Core Insurance
Article | July 11, 2022
Despite economic pressures on reinsurers and cedants, nearly all buyers were able to secure coverage during the reinsurance renewal period. However, attachment levels and the cost of ceding risk were higher than most buyers desired, and supply constraints in some lines and territories caused stress not seen in years. As a result, according to Gallagher Re's latest 1st View renewals report, the reinsurance market has maintained its firming trend.
Despite mostly positive H1 2022 results, the combination of inflation and rising interest rates has caused reinsurers to adjust their balance sheets and reserves while also taking into account how a recessionary environment may increase claims frequency.
These economic factors, combined with sustained loss levels, allowed reinsurers to maintain upward pricing pressure as they sought to reduce their appetite for volatility.
Key Contributions to Understanding:
Natural disaster capacity decreased overall as reinsurers continued to shift away from low-level layers, which differed by country and region.
Reinsurers were seen assessing cedants' inflation-related actions and applying carefully calculated loadings to relevant treaties.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine increased interest in cyber and war contract provisions.
Long-tail casualty placements remained popular among reinsurers, but there was more debate about ceding commissions than in recent renewals.
Higher ILS risk transfer prices have attracted net new capital, but this has not resulted in market softening.
The inflation discussions have been detailed and technical, with reinsurers eager to challenge cedants' model outputs. Most reinsurers are assessing reserve adequacy as interest rates rise, in addition to their concerns about primary rate adequacy in the new inflationary environment.
They are experiencing effects simultaneously on the asset and liability sides, which has strengthened their resolve to maintain the pricing momentum of the previous two years.
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