Insurance Automation Essential for a Florida Property & Casualty Insurance Company
Statista.com reveals that the US property-casualty and direct insurance market is expected to expand to $696.67 billion in 2021, slightly higher than the previous year. Experts reveal one of the key elements that will fuel the insurance industry in the next decade is the adoption of innovative technologies across all components of the insurance business, including in the Property & Casualty Insurance (P&C) niche.
Essentially, P&C is undeniably one of the most rigorous and highly technical niches prone to costly mistakes running to millions of dollars when underwriting processes are done manually. Insurance providers are now implementing Insurance Automation to mitigate these risks, protect their business, increase efficiency and offer a better customer experience.
Florida P&C insurance companies need insurance automation technologies such as data analytics, AI, ML, and RPA to limit risks and do more with fewer resources.
What Is Insurance Automation?
Insurance Automation (IA) leverages top-notch technologies to manage, automate and integrate digital processes. With the right IPA, Florida property and casualty insurance providers can automate various manual tasks, improve customer support, and detect and prevent fraud before it impacts the organization.
Automation helps streamline invoice and payment processing and other essential processes such as policy underwriting and claims management. By integrating automation, P&C providers remove the risks of errors typical with manual processes while ensuring optimized efficiency and enhanced productivity.
What Is Insurance Automation (IA) for P&C Industries?
Some of the IA technologies that companies in the P&C niches leverage include:
Digital Process Automation (DPA)
Digital Process Automation (DPA) automates tasks that usually need human intervention. These include functions in management, product, marketing, policy, accounting, sales, accounting, and more.
Ideally, all business functions and departmental workflows can be streamlined by DPA to ensure the insurance carrier receives a positive experience. The automated tasks can also benefit external users, including customers, vendors, and stakeholders by ensuring a better user experience on multiple touchpoints.
Robotic Process Automation (RPA)
Another crucial technology widely used in the P&C industry is the RPA. Bots are designed to emulate human interactions with digital processes. RPA processes build, deploy and manage bots used to streamline and automate various functions within the insurance sector.
Bots typically work faster and more consistently than humans while eliminating errors typical of manual processes. When RPA is paired with Machine Learning, the bots learn and develop over time to become highly precise and efficient.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML)
Artificial Intelligence (AI) undoubtedly takes IPA to another level. Compared with DPA and RPA that emulate human tasks, AI undertakes complex tasks that humans typically find challenging. For example, AI can recognize patterns of massive unstructured data sets and provide a clear summary of the patterns, so humans can gain valuable insights when making accurate future decisions.
When AI is paired with subset ML, machines will automatically learn from data without the need to undertake complex programming.
The Florida P&C Insurance Processes That Use Automated Processes
There is no doubt technology is changing the Insurance landscape. Some of the immediate benefits of automated insurance processes include increased profitability, better security, and improved risk management. The specific insurance processes that can benefit from automation include:
Claims Processing
Claims processes are traditionally slow due to a higher need for meticulousness when checking and verifying the client’s claims. Companies that have not yet integrated automated claims processes go through many challenges when trying to process claims. Claims processing teams typically spend hours manually ascertaining the client’s losses, issuing settlement notices, assessing damages, and processing payments. Additionally, claims submitted from online channels such as emails and phones must be keyed in by hand into the system. Where multiple data and systems are involved, costly errors are prone to happen.
To overcome all these challenges, insurance companies in Florida are now leaning towards automating their claims processes, as the benefits of incoming technologies such as RPA can no longer be overlooked.
Automated claims processing improves quality, consistency, operational efficiency, reliability while saving considerable time. It also simplifies auditing, improves data security, cuts costs, and ensures better utilization of skilled personnel.
Policy Management
Policy management encompasses all the end-to-end processes of handling insurance services. As part of policy management processes, insurers handle mountains of tasks on a daily basis, including but not limited to policy renewal and cancellation, quoting, proposal generation, compliance checking, and more. When done manually, these tasks are tedious and non-inspiring for employees while giving room for higher risks of errors. By automating these tasks, insurers gain a competitive edge and become more cost-efficient for better delivery of services.
Regulatory Compliance
For a long time, compliance teams in insurance companies have struggled to keep track of the changing industry regulations. A recent study by Thomson Reuters reveals one-third of the insurers spend at least one day a week to keep track of all the changing regulations. As business needs evolve to become more challenging, the speed and sheer breadth of regulatory change remain a constant challenge for most firms. Automating regulatory compliance can help your teams change focus from being reactive to highly proactive in mitigating risks.
RPA, in insurance and automated compliance, documents how functions are governed. Insurer tools, technologies, and analytics connect with each other and other parts of the business to ensure enterprise-wide accuracy.
Connecting automated processes to specific aspects of regulations and control offers a great way to produce an instantly accessible audit trail that ultimately facilitates regulatory scrutiny. It also facilitates easier and more effective change management whenever new regulatory requirements are introduced.
Underwriting
Traditionally, underwriting has been one of the most complex and nuanced aspects of the insurance business. When done manually, this process typically takes a lot of time while consuming massive resources. Integrating automated underwriting software ensures Florida insurers spend less time wading through paperwork and more time adding value to their business.
Automated underwriting keeps insurers in firm control by enabling the underwriters to set their own risk limits and price bands. It also helps speed up and optimize processes for clients to receive decisions more quickly. Automated underwriting undeniably holds the promise of optimized process flow, more consistent underwriting decisions, improved tracking, higher customer services, and more.
Why Insurance Automation is Important for Florida
Recent studies reveal automation could save the insurance industry between $5-7 billion. Ideally, the ongoing global pandemic has introduced new challenges and reshaped business practices and market mechanisms.
More and more insurance companies in Florida are now turning to technology to save costs, streamline operations, improve efficiency, meet compliance needs and do much more. Insurance automation allows a versatile, quick, and accurate service that beneficially impacts the bottom line and enhances customer experience.
While the biggest use case for automation technology in insurance is automating claims processing to improve its quality, speed, and availability, other aspects of the insurance company are also benefiting from automation. Undeniably, the P&C providers who adopt automation today have the potential to lead the industry.