AI in the insurance sector: depth and scope
The insurance sector is still highly reliant on manual activities compared to other industries; underwriting and claims management processes, specifically, revolve around manual retrieving or producing of information from paper documents. The industry is raising its game, however, and introducing more automation and technology to improve processes. In fact, 34% of insurance businesses report that they are implementing or have already implemented an artificial intelligence programme to improve their operational efficiency, while 27% plan to extend its adoption and 30% will initiate implementation over the next 12 months, according to reports1. In particular, insurers have welcomed the introduction of AI solutions to support them in fraud detection, pricing, underwriting, claims and customer journey related processes.
NLP to take operational efficiency to the next level
Within the wide range of AI, NLP solutions play a key role.
Companies typically focus on applying AI techniques to extract value from numbers but also understanding natural language within texts and extracting relevant information from them can empower operational efficiency and support business.
Expert.ai, the leading company in AI-based natural language software with more than 20 years of experience in natural language understanding, has developed the first HybridNL Platform to address the complex needs of business by combining symbolic and machine learning approaches.
The platform leverages powerful technology that is able to understand language with high accuracy and with limited training compared to the standard Machine Learning approach.
It overcomes traditional solutions which struggle to understand language and to scale language-driven processes well.
Fincons and Expert.ai, together for a better insurance experience
Fincons Group immediately recognized the potential of Expert.ai to radically improve insurance processes (as well as banking), especially for people-intensive activities that thanks to NLP technology can be automated and scaled with no limits.
These considerations have created a space for a great collaboration between Fincons and Expert.ai which have joined forces to offer the solution to support companies in the insurance sector in:
- identifying room for improvement in the existing processes in which a huge amount of text is processed;
- designing tailored solutions to automate processes by applying the Expert.ai technology;
- integrating Expert.ai technology within the specific architectural environment of each insurance company.
A set of services made possible thanks to Fincons’ solid skills and expertise in the insurance space, both on functional and technical levels.
Insurers can now introduce NLP in different areas, based on their unique needs to act on specific use cases. A set of relevant examples is outlined below.
Managing and engineering risk
By extracting and checking data from risk assessment documentation with Expert.ai technology, Insurers can punctually assess risks, highlight risk exposure and automatically identify policy inconsistencies from insurance documents.
Everything is carried out without the standard constraints of traditional processes such as limited capacity, subjectivity and high costs which typically bring underwriters to analyze only 1/3 of the available documentation.
The benefits cover not only operations but the entire business because this innovative approach helps underwriters to prevent financial losses and to reduce the required time for quoting new policies, improving win ratio and customer experience. In fact, conservative estimates made to date suggest that it is possible to reduce overall process time by 50%, while achieving 85% accuracy of risk analysis thanks to NLP technology2.
More efficient claims management
NLP can also help insurers make better, faster decisions regarding a claim, without bypassing human decision makers, but quickly providing them all the information needed to process them. Claim specialists in fact continue to have to devote a disproportionate part of their time to cleaning up ancillary or superfluous information when making evaluations.
Fincons and Expert.ai can support insurers in automatically extracting relevant information from claim documents provided in different sources and formats, improving efficiency and reducing both the risk of penalties due to delay in claims processing and erroneous payouts due to human errors.
Digitalization for a better customer journey
Customer experience is becoming increasingly digitalized across all industries. The insurance sector is not immune to this trend, and the process driving customers to contract closure rapidly and painlessly across channels is of key importance.
In this context, NLP enables to read, understand and identify discrepancies or possible mistakes from data or documents provided by the customers to buy a policy before it’s too late, improving customer experience and becoming increasingly valuable in helping insurers gain conversions and loyalty.
In policy renewal too, NLP can bring added value by automating the comparison between policies and speeding up the signing of the new contracts.
As customer experience continues to become ever more digital and multichannel it is critical that insurers do not overlook the key role played by NLP and automation in helping them deliver top-class services and experiences, while reaping productivity and efficiency rewards.
Are you interested in evaluating how NLP can help your company to increase productivity and reach your business goals?