Top RPA Use Cases in the Insurance Industry

It has been established that the workforce in the insurance industry is, to a great extent, burdened with mundane and repetitive tasks. Most of the time, the skills and time of this workforce are hardly invested in more productive and efficient capacities.

Daily undertakings such as claims processing, personal and insurance onboarding, and policyholder services are some of the many important but repetitive tasks influencing the insurance industry. These tasks have had an overall influence on the industry’s efficiency affecting business conversion, profitability, and customer satisfaction.

However, the solution to solving these repetitive tasks handled by the human workforce is the introduction of Robotic Process Automation (RPA) in the insurance sector. RPA can help perform repetitive tasks more efficiently, accurately, and tirelessly than humans. This results in the human workforce having enough time to focus on tasks that need human interventions, such as emotional intelligence, reasoning, and judgment.

The RPA can assist insurers in the insurance space to build a high-growth responsive business at a cost-effective rate. Thus, more value is created in the insurance industry.

Discover more RPA opportunities for other industries, e.g., automation in e-commerce.

Robotic process automation (RPA) is a software algorithm program set up to design, deploy, and oversee software robots or bots that can mimic, learn and perform rules-based business functions.

Insurance companies all over the world, irrespective of their size, face various challenges in the course of managing their businesses. However, insurance companies heavily dependent on back-office operations mostly suffer the impact of these challenges. Challenges faced by these insurance companies include;

• Manual data entry processes are time-consuming and expensive. Manual processes are also liable to human errors leading to a major record discrepancy.
• The need to constantly realign with ever-changing regulations which are usually difficult. Non-compliance often leads to severe operational and financial outcomes.
• Difficult in incorporating systems with existing ones when implementing new BPM and ERP solutions. Even with complete integration, the legal system available to insurance companies can no longer support growth.

Robotic process automation (RPA) in the insurance sector can be of help in so many areas, and these include;

The processing of claims is vital to the profitability of insurance companies. But, many of these insurance providers manually process insurance claims which are usually time-consuming and error-prone. However, by integrating RPA into the insurance sector, claims and document processing are accurate and efficient, eliminating human errors to the barest minimum.

Integrating RPA in the insurance sector makes scalability simple, as it is feasible to decrease or increase the number of active RPA robots. Depending on the workload of an insurance firm, RPA robots can be scaled up or down. This scaling, whether temporal or permanent, is essential to meet insurance companies’ long-term goals and objectives, fostering growth in the process.

A lot of insurance companies still depend on disparate applications or legacy systems. But with the non-intrusive disposition of the RPA, business operations can be streamlined. RPA is known to emulate human mouse clicks and keystrokes, communicating with the exhibition layer of computer applications and programs.

To this end, RPA can be implemented to synchronize with existing programs without requiring insurance companies to replace the present IT setup. This implementation also can be done with little or no support from the IT department since no programming knowledge is needed to carry out the task.

Compliance with standard regulations is vital to the success of insurance providers. RPA ensures that all data logins are valid and precise while maintaining running logs of all activities. Hence, insurance providers can monitor their compliance with various regulations based on their internal reviews. RPA allows insurance providers to get prepaid for internal and external audits in the face of ever-changing regulatory compliance.

There are several real-life use cases of RPA in the insurance sector. RPA can computerize end-to-end processes by incorporating new front-end technologies with back-office settings, making it a perfect fit in the insurance industry. Let’s look at RPA in insurance, use cases, and implementation.

Underwriting entails assessing clients’ exposures and risks; it involves gathering information from several sources and evaluating the risks that come with the policy. Data analysis, scrambling, and assessing the risk involved before concluding takes 2-3 weeks.

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) computerizes the entire data collection process from internal and external sources. Hence, significantly reducing the time consumed for underwriting. RPA also increases multiple fields in the internal systems using applicable data to give reports or recommendations. This is usually the basis for the pricing of products and underwriting.

Insurance providers can only satisfy and improve customer services if they can measure their overall operations. The huge amount of paperwork and operational processes makes it nearly impossible to measure and trail operational efficiency or point out areas that need improvement.

With computerization processes being established, the tasks carried out by RPA can be monitored easily with little or no manual effort. Also, exceptions met during several transaction processes can be easily measured using RPA. The audit pathway constructed by RPA assists with regulatory compliance, leading to enhanced processes. To this end, customer service response time and claims processing are improved, seeing many clients benefit from the streamlined processes. 

Policy administration connects an insurance provider’s processes, from quoting, underwriting, and rating to distributing customer services. However, the present policy administration in the insurance sector is archaic, expensive, and of high maintenance. As such, the policy admin cannot scale fast enough to cater to the demands of clients and support growth.

This RPA in the insurance use case enables all vital players in every process to achieve an abundance of processes effortlessly without having to involve huge navigation across the systems. It automates administrative and transactional functions such as settlements, accounting, risk capture, tax, regulatory compliance, and credit control.

With RPA in charge of repetitive and mundane tasks, back-office personnel can then focus more on front-office functions where they can attend to complex human demands and facilitate all-around growth.

Another RPA in insurance use cases is the ease it brings to the daunting and challenging sales and distribution tasks. Robotic Process Automation (RPA) helps to create sales scorecards to help push notifications to insurance agents and help supervise compliance.

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is built to carry out keystrokes, clicks, copy-pasting information, temple auto-fill, field entries, pressing buttons, and lots more. As a result, a larger percentage of daily bank reconciliations are automated, and transactional expenses are reduced, including policy-cost footprint.

An important RPA in insurance use cases is its integration with legacy applications. Many insurance companies will make use of legacy applications for their business operations. Implementing and handling BPM and ERP systems are quite difficult and need integration with these Legacy applications.

RPA can fit perfectly into the prevailing workflow of insurance providers, adapting to any system made available for use.

Many insurance companies have had quite a success story by implementing RPA in their system.

A global insurance company reduced the reporting process from 180 minutes to 3 seconds after implementing RPA. Another international consultancy firm was also able to save 54,000 hours of work yearly while also getting an 85% improvement in accuracy with RPA.

Capgemini also reported an increase in productivity of 50% on average in business units where insurance providers implement RPA. Furthermore, companies in highly regulated sectors such as insurance and banking are learning that automation is an inexpensive and rapid way of employing superior skills to address the problems of compliance documentation and checks.

However, designing and developing a good robotics implementation requires a deep level of technicality. While it is true that anyone can learn to code robots, not everyone will be good at it. Read why your non-technical RPA developer sucks to prevent the failure of your project.

Integrating RPA in the insurance sector comes with a lot of benefits. Some of the benefits include;

Insurance providers get to enjoy the advantages of consistency of process with RPA. RPA entertains repetitive processes governed by rules and accuracy that even bright minds cannot possibly maintain.

Making use of RPA increases data validity. This is because, unlike humans, robots are less likely to input wrong data into records.

Integrating RPA requires insurance companies to make use of standardized processes. Through standardization, companies increase staff efficiency while increasing the accuracy and speed at which robots carry out tasks.

Many organizations now look to embrace RPA within their system. However, the overall efficiency depends on a thoughtful implementation of RPA. It is best that at the first trial, RPA should be implemented for a set of operations that require little to no human judgment. After a successful implementation, RPA can have more use cases within the organization.

Flobotics offers RPA implementation services distinct to your firm’s goals and use cases. We use RPA as an extensive tactical tool to assist you in getting more out of your business. We carefully assess the practicality of a proposal for a business unit and then develop a scalable strategy to implement the solution across your business smoothly. We are ready to walk the extra mile with you. Find out what we can be achieved for your business by implementing RPA in insurance processes.