AI solutions driving the future of insurance

IN Partnership with

EXL wants insurers to prioritise unlocking the value of their data by increasing customer satisfaction, streamlining systems, enhancing processes, boosting employee productivity, and accelerating time to market

THE FUTURE has caught up with the insurance industry and can’t be ignored any longer. While other businesses have increasingly embraced the technological changes prompted by the pandemic, insurance has a more conservative approach that even top leadership sometimes laments. With large swathes of society now thoroughly familiar with working and living remotely and seeing technology’s impact on other services, the bar has been raised for insurance, like it or not.

EXL is a leading data analytics and digital operations and solutions company that partners with clients to improve business outcomes and unlock growth. By bringing together deep domain expertise with robust data, powerful analytics, the cloud, artificial intelligence and machine learning, EXL creates agile, scalable solutions and executes complex operations in industries such as insurance, healthcare, banking and financial services, the media and retail. Focused on driving faster decision-making and transforming operating models, EXL was founded on the core values of innovation, collaboration, excellence, integrity and respect. EXL works with some of the leading insurers in Australia and globally.

Find out more

Companies know they need to transform digitally

believe data quality hurts their 77% competitive advantage

77%

“We are a business evolution partner to insurers, tailoring solutions that make the most of data, AI, advanced analytics and advanced automation to make better and faster business decisions”

Vikas Kapoor, EXL

To be fair, many insurers have responded well to the digital challenges encountered during the pandemic. But leading global analytics and digital solutions company EXL sees a need for a longer-term approach to ensure there is an accelerated path to a data-led digital transformation that will deliver a sustainable competitive advantage and profitable growth, especially in a rapidly changing inflationary economic environment. “Post COVID, there is a significant change in customer expectations when it comes to digital adoption and expectation – they are demanding a more seamless and personalised experience across channels of choice in a speedy manner,” says EXL’s senior vice president and global co-head of general insurance, Vikas Kapoor. “By prioritising effective data and by adopting enabling technology like AI, advanced analytics and hyper automation, insurers can improve operations, innovate their product portfolio, enhance their claims operations and transform overall customer and employee experience,” says Kapoor, citing the role of data in insurance related to the extreme weather events in New South Wales and Queensland as an example.

The key is to operationalise the transformation roadmap in a manner that is specific to the insurer’s ecosystem, organisational capabilities and cultural landscape, as well as focus on increasing speed to respond to the market faster. Generating sustained value through speed This is where a global analytics and digital solutions company like EXL comes in. “We are a business evolution partner to insurers, tailoring solutions that make the most of data, AI, advanced analytics and advanced automation to make better and faster business decisions and drive more intelligence into their increasingly digital operations,” says Kapoor.

“Our end-to-end insurance solutions support insurers who are looking to adopt a data-led, truly digital operating model approach to transformation at both at the front end, where data and technology enhances the customer experience, and at the back end, where digital drives productivity gains and operational performance improvements.” Some of EXL’s AI-driven solutions delivering value across the globe include:

“The [claims] that are more infrequent but create the most challenge to resolve are of course sexual abuse,” Davis says. “We were one of the first carriers to offer an affirmative sexual abuse policy back in the late ’80s – so we actually said, ‘This is what we will cover’ and didn’t go silent on it.” In the face of market upheaval, insurers are promoting their offerings or planning new products. At AmTrust, Sree says, the focus has been on “cross-selling to provide more broad-based coverage and providing enhanced coverage for our insureds.” Meanwhile, Convelo is developing a few new tech-driven programs, which will be available over the next six months or so. Smith says the company is “highly focused on technology to deliver top-of-the-market products to our broker partners in an efficient, easy-to-use platform. We are using this technology not only to automate systems and make the buying process easier, but also to improve in risk selection and lower claims costs.” NIA has responded to the pandemic by rolling out a new communicable disease form on the liability side. “That’s something that really nobody else has done,” Davis says. “But we saw that we have nonprofits who have to continue housing the homeless; they have to continue to work.” The coverage form delivers $250,000 of defense inside the limits. “It’s trying to be the coverage that nonprofits need without offering limits that might become opportunistic with some plaintiff attorneys,” Davis says.

“Successful insurance operations will need to attract, retain and develop top talent. This challenge is leading them to take steps to not only recruit but also enable better employee experiences”

Vikas Kapoor, EXL

“With these and with many other solutions across the insurance value chain, our approach is to help insurers become not just data-led but data leaders,” says Kapoor. The driving force behind the speed element is known as ‘the millisecond economy’. This involves the worldwide shift of customers predominantly using digital-first channels to engage with companies, and the accompanying expectation that they can make purchases, resolve issues and get the services they need immediately. Responding with the speed and accuracy these changes demand is only possible by leveraging data, advanced analytics, advanced automation, AI and the cloud.

“We do this by bringing a data-led, insurance-centric lens to our solutions,” says Kapoor. “Data needs to inform and support decision-making and not make the decision itself. By combining our industry solutions and insurance domain expertise with AI, advanced analytics and hyper automation, insurers can accelerate their decision-making and operations transformation,” says Kapoor.

Data leaders make greater use of advanced technologies/strategies

Making better decisions, quicker, with AI Quick and effective decision-making is essential to the insurance industry, particularly in the claims area. Optimising data intake using AI and a strong data-ingestion framework have become key priorities for insurers and brokers. Insurers capture a significant amount of data, such as customer quotes and pricing, broker notes, and policy and claim details. EXL’s AI-driven digital intake solution helps insurers automate the process of ingesting, analysing and structuring this data to extract actionable insights. One global insurer is currently implementing EXL’s AI-based data-ingestion framework to reimagine the Certificate of Insurance process workflow. By intelligently automating almost half a million requests per year from more than 8,000 clients, the insurer will see efficiency increases of up to 50%. Accelerating transformation using the cloud Speed is of the essence in digital transformation. Using the cloud allows clean data flows that circumvent cumbersome legacy processes and technology. The result is faster deployment of machine learning, automation and AI, and earlier adding of value. EXL recently partnered with a land title insurance company to help it achieve 25% savings and cut policy-issuing time from days to minutes by establishing a cloud receiving centre utilising AI and automation. Transforming the customer experience with conversational technologies Conversational technologies offer the potential to transform the customer experience. Intelligent customer interactions with chatbots, voice assistants and other similar conversational platforms such as EXL Exelia.AI™ enable insurance companies to personalise, automate and scale customer experience. Machine-to-human conversations become more natural and empathetic, as well as more immediate and less costly.

The importance of people, ‘human-in-the-loop' While there are sometimes fears that introducing AI and automation will somehow diminish the human side of the equation, once it’s implemented well, many employees are able to reorient away from mundane tasks to jobs with greater human interaction and value. “This is the most important dimension of creating operating models where technology and humans coexist to ensure an empathetic, customer-centric framework but one that is efficient, agile and empowers an insurer’s workforce,” says Kapoor. “You don’t want a claims agent to spend most of the time collecting various documents or doing basic validation checks – you want them to focus on taking care of customer outcomes.” Employing AI, advanced analytics and automation also enables humans to work better through less errors or repetition, as well as adapt faster to regulatory and compliance developments. The ideal that EXL aims for is technology to enable both human and machine resources, dubbed ‘human-in-the-loop’. “The human brings along empathy, intricate personalisation, high-end judgment-oriented decision-making, or exception processing, [while] the technology aids in speed, agility and scale,” says Kapoor. “Successful insurance operations will need to attract, retain and develop top talent. This challenge is leading them to take steps to not only recruit but also enable better employee experiences. “The greatest focus has got to be on creating the right kind of environment that encourages and rewards your own people to be creative, flexible and to constantly climb the learning curve.” The way forward is for companies to focus on ensuring existing staff are encouraged to upskill, as well as be creative, flexible and willing to work at something that is a static process but a mix of semi-automated and machine-supported tasks that is continually evolving. “A sharp focus on advanced automation, advanced analytics, AI and the use of data, tailored with insurance in mind, along with a well-thought-out people strategy combined with a specialised technological enabler, bringing in the ‘human-in-the-loop', is the fundamental premise of data-led insurance operations of the future,” says Kapoor.

say digital CX capabilities impact competitiveness

72%

agree their operating model is being significantly transformed with digital and AI

66%

Source: Forbes Insights and EXL survey

Key Media

Insurance Business America

Insurance Business Canada

Wealth Professional Canada

People

Terms & conditions

Conditions of use

About us

RSS

Asia

SPECIALTY

BEST INSURANCE

RESOURCES

RISK MANAGEMENT

FEATURES

NEWS

Cloud services and platforms

Integrating internal and third-party data

Advanced analytics

Intelligent automation

AI/machine learning

Edge computing

46%

17%

46%

14%

32%

30%

14%

35%

29%

Use by data leaders

Use by others

Source: Forbes Insights and EXL survey

People

Terms & conditions

Conditions of use

About us

RSS

Asia

specialty

Best Insurance

Resources

RISK MANAGEMENT

FEATURES

News

Use by data leaders

Use by others

Cloud services and platforms

Integrating internal and third-party data

Advanced analytics

Intelligent automation

AI/machine learning

Edge computing

46%

17%

46%

14%

32%

30%

14%

35%

29%

People

Terms & conditions

Conditions of use

About us

RSS

Asia

specialty

Best Insurance

Resources

RISK MANAGEMENT

FEATURES

News