Complete Guide to RPA in Insurance

Table of Contents What Is RPA in Insurance? Unlocking Performance With Insurance RPA Real World RPA Insurance Use Cases Benefits of RPA in the Insurance Industry Implement RPA in Your Organization Gain a Competitive Advantage With RPA

 

Remaining competitive in today’s market demands a thoughtful adoption of new technologies. From manufacturing and construction to healthcare and insurance, RPA in insurance is one way for those in the industry to get ahead.

The technology is known as robotic process automation (RPA), has become recognized for its ability to decrease overhead costs, reduce operational risk, standardize business processes, and improve customer service.

Though RPA is gaining popularity across a diverse range of sectors, it’s proved to be especially promising among insurance companies. In fact, according to one Gartner study, roughly 70% of insurance firms have already implemented some form of RPA.

In this article, we explain why RPA has become such a cornerstone technology among insurers. We also discuss how it can help your organization gain a competitive edge to become a leading insurance company.

What Is RPA in Insurance?

Before discussing robotic process automation in insurance, it’s important to understand what RPA actually is. Broadly speaking, the purpose of RPA is to automate certain types of tasks. These tasks are typically tedious, repetitive, time-consuming, and high-volume.

 

 

It’s worth noting that RPA is not a technology on its own. Rather, RPA is an agglomeration of various technologies operating together. This includes things like natural language processing (NLP), pattern recognition, machine vision, and machine learning (ML). 

Ultimately, this enables RPA to act as a human would under similar circumstances—but with greater speed and fewer mistakes. When used in conjunction with ML, RPA can become a highly intelligent, self-learning system.

So, how does RPA apply to insurance operations? RPA insurance services leverage low-code, rules-based RPA bots to handle tedious workloads. Some examples include:

• Setting up new user accounts
• Processing transactions
• Gathering customer information for underwriting
• Running background and security checks
• Performing calculations and providing pricing options
• Collecting data from internal and external sources
• Moving and copying files and folders
• Generating dashboards
• Reading and creating PDF and Word documents
• Extracting claims data
• After-sales support
• Predictive maintenance
• Opening and sending emails
• Other forms of data entry

Increasing Performance With Insurance RPA

In the last few years, major insurance companies have all been turning to RPA to automate tedious workloads and improve productivity. In fact, one analysis conducted by Grand View Research predicts that the RPA global market size will have a compound annual growth rate (CGAR) of around 38% between 2022 and 2030.

As more companies adopt RPA, more use cases are discovered. Whether it’s underwriting life insurance policies or streamlining the claims management process, the applications are vast Now, let’s look at some real-life robotic process automation insurance use cases.

Real World RPA Insurance Use Cases

1. National Auto Care (NAC) – RPA Proposal Builder

For this robotic process automation insurance use case, we were tasked with designing an RPA bot that could create a professional proposal booklet in a matter of minutes. These booklets needed to include targeted product information, unique to each client. Insurance agents could then present these booklets to clients.

Previously, the backend team had been responsible for generating proposal booklets on behalf of agents. Therefore, the goal of this project was to decrease the insurance agent’s dependence on the backend team, while also decreasing the backend team’s workload so they could focus on more important tasks.

In the end, the RPA software was successfully able to:

• • Generate unique Dynamic Proposal Booklets within minutes in PDF format;
  • Include accurate product, rate, and performance comparisons;
  • Manage profiles for different types of users;
  • Enable/disable functions using role-based access management;
  • Provide real-time calculations and proposal previews; and
  • Connect to legacy systems through third-party integration.
    

2. RPA in Insurance Claims

RPA is being used to automate a variety of claims management processes. Some examples include:

• • Claims payments
  • Claim authorizations approval notification
  • Guaranteed Asset Protection (GAP) claim notification
  • Claim self-adjudication

Consider how claims payments are traditionally handled. A policyholder will submit an insurance claim after suffering damage or loss. Inspection vendors and repair facilities are now tasked with inspecting or repairing said damage.

As the work is carried out, the repair and inspection invoices are sent by email on a monthly or biweekly basis to the insurer. Each invoice must then be manually authorized by the claims team, who will release the payment by check or credit card upon approval.

 

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Now, depending on the type of damage, this review process can take between 10 and 20 minutes. This doesn’t seem like much, but it quickly adds up. Consider that inspection vendors and repair facilities submit invoices in more than 10 different forms, on behalf of a variety of clients, on a biweekly or monthly basis.

Obviously, manually parsing through these claims can be extremely time-consuming and error-prone for the payer. To solve this issue, RPA bots can be leveraged to automate the entire claim authorization and payment process.

The procedure is automatic from start to finish. It begins by downloading the email invoice attachment, reading the invoice data, authorizing the claim through the admin platform, compensating the payee using the correct payment method, and sending a payment confirmation to them.

 

 

This RPA use case is both simple and cost-effective. And yet it provides an enormous return on investment (ROI) by freeing up your claims team to do other work, reducing payment errors, and expediting payment delivery time. 

This particular system has proved extremely effective for various types of coverage, such as Property and Casualty (P&C) Insurance RPA.

What Are the Key Benefits of Robotic Process Automation in the Insurance Industry?

It’s clear that RPA has become an invaluable tool for insurance firms. According to a recent McKinsey study, RPA can decrease insurance data processing time by as much as 34%. Because processing data is a huge part of the insurance industry business model, RPA is a natural fit. 

Below, we discuss this and other benefits that insurance companies can reap from RPA adoption.

1. Scalability, Agility, Availability

Maintaining a staff that can handle growing demand has become a major challenge in the insurance industry. Often, companies will discover that they’re scaling more rapidly than they can keep up with. Hiring and training new staff requires an enormous amount of time and energy. RPA offers a scalable solution that’s both agile and highly available to keep things moving forward.

2. Cost-Savings

Insurance RPA offers a massive boost in productivity by streamlining operations and offloading tedious, labor-intensive tasks. All of this translates to a tangible reduction in overall costs. And, with your team’s newfound time, they’re free to work towards more important goals that will drive business growth.

3. Triage and Indexing

The ability to quickly and accurately triage insurance claims is an integral part of good service delivery. RPA utilizes the information provided by the customer to help gauge claim urgency, promoting data-driven decision-making, reducing the chance of misclassification, and aggressively pricing risk.

 

 

4. Operational Efficiency

For many firms, this is the number one RPA benefit in insurance. That’s because the combination of robotic process automation and insurance drastically improves overall operational efficiency. For example, RPA makes the process of data extraction automatic. Plus, it can instantly auto-populate systems, auto-decline submissions, auto-route claims, and much more.

5. Faster and Improved Customer Service

It’s a fact that good customer experiences drive business. That means fast, fair, and user-friendly service every time. To ensure that you’re always delivering, consider implementing RPA for client-facing services.

For instance, tasks like customer support or First Notice of Loss (FNOL) can be effectively handled by RPA. The former constitutes an exciting mix of technologies like NLP and emotion recognition, while the latter leverages machine vision to assess damage and facilitate claims processing in real time.

6. Contact Center Efficiencies

Call centers and customer support are notoriously expensive to maintain and get bogged down by inefficiencies. RPA implementation is one of the best ways to improve performance and reduce overhead.

To accomplish this, RPA cuts costs by minimizing administrative and support workloads. Additionally, RPA services are often faster because bots can execute service requests, gather data from a variety of sources, and update digital records faster than their human counterparts.

7. Reduce Errors

High accuracy is a hallmark of RPA technology. That’s because RPA is a highly precise substitute for manual processes that were previously subject to human error. Put another way, software doesn’t get bored, tired, or distracted—people do. So, as RPA slowly replaces humans in repetitive tasks, the result will be increasingly reliable data with little to no mistakes. This is also a key feature in your adherence to strict compliance regulations.

8. Improve System Integration and Interoperability

Despite the widespread use of RPA in insurance industry systems, many companies still rely on a handful of legacy applications. These are often used for specific tasks like business process management (BPM) or the handling and execution of tail-insurance (ERP) protection.

One of the major benefits of RPA insurance is that it can seamlessly integrate with these legacy apps to adhere to existing workflows. This is achieved by deploying special application programming interfaces (APIs).

9. Risk and Compliance Reporting

Insurance companies are subject to strict compliance regulations, whether it’s creating a detailed audit trail or maintaining privacy standards.

 

 

Unfortunately, compliance violations are common due to the high volume of error-prone work associated with insurance processes. This can be especially worrisome if you’re often subject to regulatory scrutiny.

But an RPA insurance company needn’t manually enforce and verify compliance. Instead, laborious tasks like validating client info, generating reports, and sending account deletion/closure notifications are entirely automated.

How Can You Implement RPA Insurance Processes in Your Organization?

Despite its many benefits , implementing RPA technology is less expensive than you may think. This is largely due to the fact that RPA has a very low cost infrastructure. As a software-based tool it can be built, deployed, and managed through your existing systems.

With this in mind, it’s still important to understand the phases of RPA implementation. In this section, we walk you through the six-step process.

1. Consulting

Your RPA journey begins with an RPA consultation. Whether you’re working with a highly skilled in-house team or a reputed outsourced provider, this is the moment to seek advice from the experts. The consultant will guide you through the RPA process and answer any questions you may have.

2. Discovery

The discovery phase—alternately referred to as the scoping phase—is when the research process really begins. This is the moment to identify the problems you’d like to solve, as well as the needs you’ll need to meet. By the end of this step, you should understand the goals, limitations, and scope of implementing RPA.

3. Planning

Once your research is complete it’s time to start planning. In this phase, the project manager is tasked with designing a resource plan that covers the project’s tasks, cost, scope, and schedule. The manager works alongside the project team and stakeholders, establishing the roles and responsibilities needed to execute the plan.

4. Procurement

Planning gives way to the procurement phase. This stage is all about acquiring the right tools and materials necessary for implementation. But, because there are no construction or infrastructure costs associated with RPA, this stage is geared towards updating existing systems, installing new hardware, and so on.

5. Implementation

Implementation is the phase where everything finally comes together. The goal is to successfully integrate the new RPA software into your company’s existing systems and workflow. Because this phase can be complex, it’s important to run frequent tests on the functionality of new components.

6. Post-Implementation Support

With your RPA now running in a real-life environment, it’s normal to experience some hiccups. That’s why post-implementation is especially important in the early days. Fast response times, good coordination, and appropriate resource deployment is key. Unfortunately, too many RPA consultants underestimate the importance of this stage.

Ready to Gain a Competitive Advantage? 1Rivet Specializes in RPA for Insurance Companies

As we’ve seen, RPA is one of the most effective ways to boost ROI, improve accuracy, and increase productivity. It works behind the scenes to optimize tedious internal processes, allowing workers to focus on core business activities. Organizations in every sector—from Amazon to Uber to Netflix—are successfully adopting RPA to gain a competitive edge.Ready to automate your organization’s repetitive, error-prone, and high-volume tasks? Get the cutting-edge robotic process automation insurance companies can depend on 1Rivet also offers RPA services in finance. 1Rivet is an ISO-certified RPA provider that specializes in custom RPA services for insurance companies just like yours. Our Automation365 is built on the award-winning UiPath software, allowing us to design and manage custom bots on your behalf. And, with our user-friendly Automation365 dashboard, you can monitor and track key performance metrics. Contact us today to learn more about our RPA insurance services.