3 mins read
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2022

Rekeying data does not equal digitisation

by Daria Kępa-Green, Marketing Director, Cytora

Implementing automation and embarking on digital transformation projects is hard, if you’re reading this, you have probably tried doing it yourself too. The fact is, the insurance industry faces extra challenges having established and needed processes that need to be factored in.

Let’s focus on the most important process – the way risks are processed. What’s consuming the most of time and consists only of menial tasks in this workflow is entering risk information into internal systems ie. clearance tools, policy admin systems, CRM and others. For the majority of organisations, it’s what requires a lot of manual work and it’s a perfect candidate for automation. It is tempting to start with optimising it through a low tech solution i.e. by using an internal team or Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) to enter risk information into many different systems.

That, however, doesn’t solve the need for automation and digitisation of this process, it’s moving that manual rekeying process somewhere else, and the gains which improve risk selection, unlock scalability (enabling more risks to be processed and bound without adding cost) and uplift conversion are not achieved. The reality is that only automation can really improve the process in a meaningful way and create a compelling business case.

To achieve high velocity and high efficiency, risk workflows need to go through a series of steps, and all those steps get an uplift of automation:

  1. Flexible intake – automatic collection of risks from multiple sources while being ambivalent to the format of the risk submission supporting both structured (e.g. API) and unstructured (email) formats  
  2. Digitisation – turning risk submissions into decision-ready risk by extracting data from the submission, validating the integrity of the data, then augmenting the risk submission with multiple external and internal data sources. This decision-ready risk should fulfil multiple schemas for decisions downstream, and happen upstream at the point of intake
  3. Orchestration – prioritising digitised risks which are flowed through different workflows depending on the appetite and portfolio strategy of the insurer.
  4. Routing – automatically sending risk data to multiple downstream systems so that the digitised risk data can sync concurrently with multiple systems (ie. CRM, Workbench, Data Platform, auto-rating models) and eliminate rekeying
  5. Repeatable updating –  as the risk changes over time, automatically updating the risk record, ie. at the point of renewal. For example, addresses of in-force risks change continuously and this information needs to be treated as an event and automatically updated in downstream systems
Achieving digitisation

Insurers want to build efficient teams where underwriters can focus on the right risks while quoting and responding to brokers quickly – driving conversion and the volume of risks bound. This is only achievable by seeing digital not as the derivative, not as humans entering data into systems, but as the foundation by which risks are moved around the insurance company. The advantage of taking a holistic, digital approach helps insurers accelerate profitable growth and increase processing volume without adding operational cost.