Robotic Process Automation
Insurance, The RPA Way - The Industry’s New Policy
Insurance serves a growing set of customers who prefer simple, fast, and digitalised processes. Insurance companies find themselves needing to deliver on improved customer service, optimised data analytics, and development of new products at faster rates than ever before.
Digital transformation is a continuous process, not an event. The immediate need to adapt to a digital-first world has brought forth challenges to an industry steeped in legacy processes. Businesses that use cumbersome technologies and legacy practices face the risk of losing their target customers to digitally enabled competitors.
And, insurance companies that are willing to digitalise don’t have it easy either. They face many hurdles, such as:
A lack of digital talent and agile initiatives.
The need to build a digitally connected ecosystem.
Major disruption from InsurTechs.
Ongoing commoditisation.
Macroeconomic uncertainties.
Legacy systems and applications.
However, insurance today is becoming an embedded service available in products and services purchased, and because customers prefer digital interaction, insurers must adopt digital strategies to attract and engage with them or risk losing out.
Robotic process automation (RPA) is a significant part of the digital transformation strategy for insurance majors.
How does RPA help in insurance processes?
Insurers regularly handle huge amounts of monotonous, repetitive business processes that cause significant delays, thereby affecting business conversion, customer satisfaction, and profitability.
Automation in the insurance industry imitates clerical and transactional tasks and helps shoulder them by ‘taking the bot out of the human’, as Leslie Willcocks, professor at the London School of Economics, says.
This enables employees to focus on intelligent decision making, strategising, and investing in customer engagement, which is every bit as crucial as technology. With non-invasive capabilities that don’t modify any of the underlying applications, RPA in insurance delivers:
Enhanced operational effectiveness and increased cash flow.
Faster communication and shorter turnaround times.
Improved and personalised customer experience.
Streamlined processes and empowered human resources.
Better insights via data analysis and improved risk management.
RPA use cases in insurance
Insurance companies can apply RPA to a wide range of services, such as:
Underwriting and pricing:
Underwriting is a prolonged and time-consuming process that involves gathering information from multiple sources to evaluate the risks associated with a given policy. RPA automates this data collection from both internal and external systems, delivering faster and more accurate results.Claims processing and registration:
Claims processing is as data intensive and time consuming as underwriting. With the increase in the number of customers, deployment of bots can make claims processing faster by nearly 75%.Customer onboarding:
Being customer centric is how insurance and financial institutions can win the digital battle. RPA helps streamline long, tedious procedures by filling parts of the forms from the digital data collected and power customer onboarding that is quick and hassle-free.Process and business analytics:
In growing markets, it is essential to track business growth and measure operational efficiency to identify areas of improvement. Tasks performed by bots can be easily tracked, compared with manual and paper-intensive processes.
Examples where RPA has worked for insurance companies
The results of strategic RPA implementation in insurance are clearly seen in instances like these:
- One insurance company slashed its underwriting processing time by 80% by eliminating manual copying and pasting.
- Another company increased the speed of its analytics insight by transferring its claim transaction data automatically into its business intelligence application.
- Yet another insurance company slashed its cycle time of claim processing by 40%.
Insurance businesses can realise tangible benefits with outsourcing partners for RPA that have strong domain expertise and experience dealing with challenges unique to insurance.
Infosys BPM approach to RPA in insurance
One of our success stories was the implementation of RPA to simplify processes for a leading developer of solutions and services in the insurance and financial services industry.
The key challenges of time and manual effort in dealing with the quantum of data were resolved with optimum automation solutions. Bot deployment led to a reduction in manual FTE by 50%, effort-intensive manual work by 58%, and drastically improved processing time by 70%. The implementation enabled the client’s agents to take on other activities and grow the productivity of the operations team.
Infosys BPM is dedicated to a platform and technology-agnostic approach to automation that focuses on ensuring metrics improvement, savings, and ROI. With a People-Process-Technology framework, we successfully scale RPA programs, offering services such as bot support, advisory services, and pilot and PoCs.
Read the full report on how our RPA offerings in insurance delivered significant speed, cost, effort, and quality benefits.
