RPA in insurance: low risk and high reward

The client, an established insurance company, serves a number of different industries, including construction, energy, finance, healthcare, and real estate on a global basis.

Claims handling is critical because it reflects directly on an insurer’s commitment to its customers, standards of service, and overall credibility. As the first step in filing a claim, an efficient and accurate FNOL process makes the difference between a speedy settlement and one that is long and complicated, which can hurt customer experience and damage brand perception.

Historically, our client relied on a completely manual FNOL process. Every year, offshore teams of 22 full-time employees had to manage around 37,500 cases across layers of administrative systems, and with varying document formats. They performed much of this work manually.

The process started with brokers and agents submitting FNOLs in various forms, including handwritten notes, photographs, and texts. The teams set to work indexing and allocating the relevant information. They had to extract details – such as names, addresses, loss amounts, and so on – then enter them into the appropriate fields before inputting the data into the company’s claims setup system. Several complex interfaces meant staff ended up entering the same information across multiple fields and screens.

Next, they had to create and send letters updating customers on their cases. Finally, they archived all documents for compliance purposes.

From end to end, FNOL handling took significant time, required multiple touchpoints, and was highly labor intensive. With cost reduction and efficiency high on the agenda, the insurance company saw an opportunity to modernize and speed up the process through automation.

The insurance company explored several industry-leading platforms that could drive the desired outcomes. Having worked with Genpact to transform many of its middle- and backoffice operations, the company trusted us to determine where automation could help. We found that the FNOL’s high-volume, repetitive, rule-based nature made it an ideal candidate for RPA. Unlike other solutions, which would have taken as long as two years to migrate and incurred high costs, ours was an easy-to-implement, plug-and-play solution, which meant quick gains.

Partnering with Automation Anywhere, a leader in RPA, we developed and deployed four bots to take over 90% of the handling process. Offshore staff are still responsible for extracting and inputting the pertinent information from brokers’ submissions. But we integrated the bots to seamlessly interact and work with the client’s claims filing system, administrative system, and archives on the user-interface level. The bots now replicate everything from data entry to creating and sending acknowledgement letters, and finally archiving – and they do so at far greater speed and scale than humanly possible.

RPA handles all the burdensome and repetitive tasks automatically, so people are only responsible for ones that require analysis and judgment. Moreover, RPA’s flexibility helped the company realize immediate results without the need to invest in expensive solutions. That was an additional benefit because the company undertook a major acquisition and transitioned to a new system.

By reducing human intervention, our client has increased its processing accuracy by up to 98% and cut its FNOL handling time in half. Plus, minimizing the margin of human error, while also speeding things up, has contributed to higher levels of customer satisfaction. And because the company doesn’t need to rework as many claims, costs have dropped, too.

Today, the team can achieve the same level of productivity with 40% fewer resources. It operates 24/7 and has less need for offshore staff, bringing down the cost per claim. Through all these savings, the insurance company projects a 250% ROI in the first year.

Now, the company is planning to deploy 20 additional bots by the end of 2018, expand RPA across more processes in underwriting and finance, and establish a center of excellence. And it’s making use of the Genpact Intelligent Automation Index framework to funnel automation ideas, prioritizing those with the highest expected returns. Genpact has also been selected to deliver a proof of concept for intelligent dashboards and dynamic workflows, all of which will create a coherent digital ecosystem.