Insurers could do away with a lot of the existing tasks with the help of RPA.

Insurers could do away with a lot of the existing tasks with the help of RPA. Source: Shutterstock

How RPA brings value to insurance professionals

RPA or Robotic Process Automation is designed to help businesses make life simple for its executives, especially when it comes to repetitive tasks. The technology is fairly inexpensive, easy to adopt and deploy, and quite effective.

For insurance professionals, RPA is a boon.

The industry is perfect for the deployment of RPA bots, given the number of repetitive tasks that highly qualified executives and professional actuaries perform on a daily basis.

Here are some key areas where RPA can immediately help insurance professionals and make them more efficient and productive:

# 1 | Regulatory and compliance filings

The insurance industry is at the center of the world’s financial regulator’s attention. Insurers, depending on which part of the world they operate in, are required to work with different financial services authorities, government entities, and professional standards bodies on a regular basis.

Insurance professionals create and send hundreds of thousands of filings and notices about their day to day operations, non-standard actions, and essential business transactions, per stipulations and obligations prevailing in the region.

Almost all of these are repetitive tasks and can be automated using RPA. Doing so can make executives much more efficient, helping them think about using these reports to generate insights for the business or to better support customers, rather being glued to their spreadsheets and software tools to create the reports from scratch everytime.

# 2 | Application and claims processing

Every day, thousands of people apply for insurance. Hundreds or even thousands also file claims for damages. Insurance professionals need to go through the forms manually, decipher them, feed them into different systems and create different internal requests to get the ball rolling.

These are critical jobs in the insurance industry — and they require attention to detail, but they are quite repetitive in nature. Often, insurance professionals need to review forms just to check that they’re complete and have no apparent errors before they’re processed.

Bringing in a couple of RPA bots to take over the fundamental tasks in these functions can save valued time for insurance professionals who can then take on more responsibility in terms of scrutinizing the forms and making the overall process more efficient.

# 3 | Client communications

Insurance professionals communicate with clients quite often, on a daily basis. So, for example, when a client’s quarterly or annual premium is due, an email or text message is sent to them.

However, if they have a query about the amount, or need a copy of their policy because the original was lost or destroyed, the insurance professional needs to pull those out from the system, generate a copy, complete the formalities for the lost insurance policy (since the “true” copy is also a mortgagable asset), and then send it over.

Similarly, in terms of claims, there are various stages of the process that require communication between the insurance professional and the client — most of which can be automated. When requesting a claim, customers must provide evidence of loss or damage, in the form of a death certificate for life insurance policies or a police report in the case of fire, theft, or other general insurance policies.

Making the request for the document, processing it, sending it to the right team for verification can all be automated. Doing so will save valuable time that will enable insurance professionals to go the extra mile and improve the experience of customers, clients, and their loved ones — just as insurance was meant to be.