For over a decade, we’ve been pretending to be paperless. We tout the fact that our filing cabinets, dedicated seven-part file folders, and large mailrooms have all been eliminated and reduced, and we claim to be paperless. But we know that’s not reality. Today’s papers are PDF, Excel, and Adobe. File cabinets have been replaced with digital folders, and mailrooms have been replaced with email and digital workflows. But the truth is, we’re joking. Insurance is not paperless. It’s just pretending. But it doesn’t have to be that way. The technology exists to enable true digitization. We just have to take the leap.
One of the biggest hurdles to becoming truly digital rather than a digital paper industry involves the initial ingestion or digitization of data. We have been providing advanced OCR and computer vision solutions. While these are great for extracting information from digital forms and standardized templates, they were not sufficient to meet the needs of more complex operations such as commercial insurance claims.
A typical commercial insurance new business submission or quote request may include an application, loss statement, value statement, insurance policy, financial statements, and many other documents, depending on the type of insurance. there is. A typical commercial insurance filing contains 300 to 500 pieces of information. Invaluable information for understanding, evaluating and quoting your business.
The untapped potential of dark data
The current process for extracting data from these submissions is outdated. A common process involves routing submissions to lower-cost resources, often offshore. The resource extracts a minimal set of fields for populating your submission and some basic evaluation information. On a good day, 50 out of 500 pieces of information might be entered into the system, extracted, and converted into digital data. The rest is left on paper as dark data. Data held by carriers but never digitally exposed or made available. The electronic files containing the electronic documents are then sent to the insurance company, where these digital documents are opened multiple times as the data is not available. The process is the same as it was 300 years ago, except the file folders and documents are made of bits and bytes rather than paper and ink.
It doesn’t have to be that way. We have seen how insurance can become faster, more efficient, and more accurate when processes are digitized and personal insurance risks become simpler and more homogenized. , more complex insurance such as group benefits, commercial insurance, and specialty insurance. And that starts with the ability to capture data digitally.
Here we experienced a technological breakthrough. The integration of more advanced machine learning tools that can combine natural language processing and computer vision has made it possible to extract data from both structured and unstructured documents with greater accuracy and speed. In fact, this is one of the hottest emerging technology areas in the insurance industry today, with a wide range of players and investors. Consider the case of a Chinese life insurance company. The company introduced an intelligent risk management system that enables end-to-end automation of insurance claims. (page 11, Accelerating the future of insurance)
Learn from emerging leaders
One of the companies emerging as a new leader in this space is M.E.A. I left the UK. What makes MEA unique is that it was founded by insurance executives who understand the unique challenges associated with complex insurance documentation and have a critical understanding of the terminology, variability and complexity involved. is. The company’s solutions focus specifically on building deep expertise around core insurance concepts and an extensive insurance-specific extraction catalog, starting with a dossier that allows solutions to be quickly adapted to new insurance areas. I am putting The best part is that their team has a deep understanding of insurance, so you don’t have to train them on what insurance means when working with them.
We have been working with MEA on several initiatives and tests across Europe and the US. The breadth of their solutions has allowed us to evaluate a wide range of business sectors, business processes, and insurance entities, including insurers, MGAs, and brokers. What we’ve discovered is that we can consistently compete on speed, accuracy, and quality of testing and execution. It is indeed possible to go from evaluation to use with this type of solution within a few months.
So what does this mean for today’s digital paper world? It means that insurers now have a real option to begin their digital journey. This has been a hope and a dream for some time, but technology has really caught up with the vision of digitalization, starting with intelligent uptake.
Creating a truly touchless process
There are currently several different ways to use it. First, identify the pseudo-paperless processes that currently exist within your organization and target the documents that those processes capture. Submission is the obvious choice, but billing, border control, invoice receipt, auditing, etc. are all possibilities. Next, design how you want your digital processes to work. You can ingest and process data directly, or you can take a more measured approach that includes some level of human review and insight. Your choice should depend on the complexity and importance of your data and your comfort with its implementation, but in the long term you should expect at least some of your ingestion to be touchless. Another decision to make is whether you want to extract only the data you’ll use today, or everything in the document. This is a 50/500 question on submissions. But this will likely require other changes and other technologies to support true digital transformation. We will discuss these elements in future blogs.
But in the meantime, maybe it’s time for your insurance process to no longer be a 17th-century thing? Move from passing digital papers through email and workflow systems to creating truly digital processes. Isn’t it time? Isn’t it time to start building an intelligent ingestion solution for your company? Start building real digital insurance.
Accelerating the future of insurance: Modernizing technologies such as AI and cloud-powered data analytics can help insurers achieve profitable growth through both increased revenue and reduced costs.
