Insurance claim form. Photo: emiliezhang/ Adobe Stock
The complexities surrounding the traditional insurance model face unprecedented challenges. Evolving customer expectations, coupled with the growing impact of climate change and the need for ESG goals, are straining the industry's capacity further.
Additionally, the declining trust in institutions has made it less likely for the global population to invest in insurance, leading to wider protection gaps. According to the 2022 PwC analysis, the protection gap across sectors is expected to reach US$1,867 trillion by 2025, if carriers do not cater to the changing needs of the customers.
In another 2022 global survey, PwC claimed that the long-term corporate strategy for 80% of insurance CEOs includes customer satisfaction metrics. To achieve this, insurers must adopt innovative strategies that prioritize customer experience. Modern technology will play a crucial role in helping insurers reinvent their approach. As per a recent 2024 Deloitte survey, over a third of insurance executives have been using artificial intelligence (AI) in some way to ease processes.
Complex and decisive areas in insurance, such as claims and underwriting can greatly benefit from the new-age technologies. One such tool that is transforming the risk assessment and claim settlement functions is the AI-led workbench.
Evolution of underwriting workbench
The underwriting process takes time to analyze risk, determine pricing, and comply with the regulatory guidelines. The tools and information underwriters require to make risk decisions are often scattered across lengthy documents. This makes it difficult for underwriters to do their job quickly and effectively.
Traditional underwriting workstations marked significant improvement by aggregating information into a single user interface. This enabled underwriters to navigate across multiple processing systems such as work tracking, policy administration, and clearance.
Nevertheless, the underwriting process remained inconsistent with a vast amount of data buried under legacy systems. A 2022 Accenture report found that underwriters spend upto 40% of their time in non-core activities. As underwriters manage diverse portfolios and juggle multiple risk clauses, they require a sophisticated technology framework, accounting for risk profiles, product complexity, external data integrations, and organizational hierarchies.
An advanced workbench that offers easy integration, enhanced data augmentation, customizable interfaces, and better oversight is crucial. An underwriting workbench, equivalent to a real workbench with all the tools and data aligned, functions as a digital control panel to facilitate the insurance underwriting process from submission to policy binding.
Benefits of an underwriting workbench
Newer risk categories like cybercrime and natural catastrophes put additional challenges on underwriters. Furthermore, handling hundreds of clauses while ensuring they align with statutory requirements makes the process challenging. The policy binding process can be greatly streamlined with a unified and intelligent workbench, leading to more acceptable policy wording and pricing.
Here’s a look at how the entire underwriting team can benefit from an underwriting workbench:
Assistant underwriter: A well-structured interface allows assistant underwriters to understand the underwriting process. A workbench also minimizes the chance of misinterpreting instructions or overlooking essential steps.
Underwriter: A centralized system enables underwriters to maintain the integrity of risk assessment and pricing structures. It streamlines workflows and enables underwriters to complete their evaluations faster.
Senior underwriter: A smart workbench allows senior underwriters to monitor portfolio performance and gain visibility of the underwriting team’s activities.
Emergence of claims workbench
The claims processing landscape is complex, marked by frequent rule changes and stringent documentation requirements. This exposes insurers to expensive damage-control options and higher churn rates.
Similar to an underwriting workbench, a claims workbench serves as a critical tool for insurers to streamline the claims process, centralize data, and identify fraudulent activity. A comprehensive claims workbench has a lot to offer, from summarizing documents with GenAI capabilities to verifying claims, extracting key facts, generating clauses, and more.
Empowering users with a claims workbench
A claims workbench provides insurers with more efficient, faster, and compliant decision-making processes. An AI-powered claims workbench empowers users to work smartly by comparing multiple documents, initiating communication with stakeholders, integrating seamlessly with various insurance platforms, and highlighting critical data on documents. It minimizes claims leakage and boosts retention.
A claims workbench can empower the following business users across the claims process:
Claims officer: A workbench can enable a claims officer to upload and access all relevant documents, such as supporting proofs and claim forms, from a single location.
The surveyor: Surveyors can access and compare a range of documents to investigate the claims, invite others to make notes in real time, and quickly generate multiple reports.
The claims adjustor:An advanced workbench enables claims adjustors to retrieve all claim files easily, collaborate with multiple stakeholders, generate necessary documents for repairers, and compare invoices. This improves the accuracy and speed of the evaluation process.
The approver: Approvers can access case-related documents, and efficiently review claim sheets before they share these with the finance team for settlement.
Rana Ganguli is the global vice president of financial services at Newgen Software.
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