Underwriting triage services for life and annuity insurers

Challenge

Meet customer demands to modernize underwriting and enhance service standards when issuing policies

Life and annuity (L&A) insurance underwriting has seen disruption across four main areas:

• The way customers prefer to submit information has changed. They're used to doing everything online now, seamlessly, and expect this when buying insurance too
• Vast amounts of third-party data are now available for insurers to integrate into pricing calculations
• Insurtech startups have entered the market with better technologies that offer a flawless digital customer experience and straight-through processing – from when the customer gets in touch to when their insurer pays claims out, including at the underwriting stage
• The rise of machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) and accelerated underwriting processes

L&A insurers know they need to modernize underwriting triage systems to improve customer service, accept contributions, and harness the power of new technologies, but they struggle with three key challenges:

• Data environments that are typically fragmented and siloed across numerous home-grown legacy systems, a situation made worse by multiple mergers and acquisitions
• The inability to effectively harness and unlock value from vast volumes of internal and external data because of a lack of technology and expertise
• Limited resources to dedicate to multiyear business transformation programs and the need to focus on handling day-to-day business

To solve these problems, L&A insurers are increasingly engaging external partners to help modernize their end-to-end underwriting triage process – from application receipt all the way through the decisioning process.

Solution

AI-powered underwriting fueled by richer data

Genpact's underwriting triage services have three key goals:

• Reduce the cycle time for policy issuance
• Improve underwriting quality
• Enhance customer satisfaction

We achieve this by incorporating more data sources and then implementing advanced analytics, automation, and digital workflow orchestration tools at the triage stage.

By applying this data-driven approach to the underwriting triage process at first contact, insurers can identify quotes that they can push through to accelerated underwriting and move complex cases to receive in-depth attention, streamlining the process for the customer and the insurer.

Genpact's platform-agnostic, readily deployable AI and ML solutions teamed with enhanced third-party data offer multiple benefits for L&A insurers:

• Intelligently prioritize submissions into segments for treatment
• Predict the likelihood of an L&A underwriter accepting a quote
• Predict the likelihood of placement of a quoted risk
• Scale life risk selection with advanced analytics and smart visualization

This means submissions are quickly sorted using a single view of risk and funneled through a digital workflow that includes an integrated analytics workbench. Simple cases get sent along for accelerated underwriting, and your team has more time to consider the difficult cases. This approach reduces underwriting cycle times and makes newly acquired business cost-efficient.

Impact

Happier customers – and underwriters

By using more data and better tools to interrogate it, and by prioritizing and streamlining submissions, our insurers can focus on high-value submissions within their strike zone and risk appetite. The value we've delivered for clients includes:

• Approximately 120% improvement in submission to placement ratio
• 20–25% improvement in underwriter capacity so insurers can write more new business
• Improving cycle time, leading to a better customer experience and happier underwriters
• Improved profitability through advancements in risk selection
• Cost reduction and improved efficiency for underwriting operations

L&A underwriting triage is simpler and more streamlined, meaning fewer customers abandon their search for quotes or get frustrated by having to provide masses of information. With this data science-driven approach, L&A insurers can shift to a better way of doing business: expediting simpler quotes by leveraging third-party data and AI and ML-enabled prioritization workflows and using the freed-up time to focus their expertise on complex cases.