With record-high inflation, climate change, and an economic downturn on the horizon, the insurance industry is in a pressure cooker of unpredictable change. Sometimes this change happens over time. Sometimes it seems to happen all at once. To come out on top, insurance companies need new workflow and operations strategies that leverage process automation to streamline processes, reduce errors, and improve the customer experience.
Leading insurers are prioritizing claims process automation. Why? Because expenses related to preparing, processing, paying, and adjusting claims represent the most significant share of an insurer's operating costs. Even more than that, 87% of policyholders say the claims experience directly impacts their decision to stay with an insurance provider. But for many insurers, complex workflows, siloed data, and disparate systems have turned the claims process into a painful customer experience.
With skyrocketing inflation and growing severity of weather-related losses, 2022 was a tough year for insurers. We were spot-on with our 2022 predictions—such as the need to improve the customer experience, increased adoption of connected underwriting, and the growing importance of ESG. While many of last year’s trends will continue into 2023, we have identified several emerging trends for this year.
The underwriting process is notoriously inefficient. Today, underwriters typically spend 40% of their time on non-core activities such as gathering and entering data for submissions and renewals, issuing policies, and administrative tasks. The result of such manual underwriting is lost productivity and higher costs, with an expected price tag for insurers of $85–$160 billion in lost business over the next five years. In the current economic climate, efficiency is more important than ever.
When a leading office supply chain coined the phrase “That was easy!” in an iconic 10-year-long ad campaign, that simple idea resonated with people everywhere. And that’s no coincidence. None of us wants our daily tasks to be labor-intensive, time-consuming, or complicated. The same is true in the world of insurance. To drive growth, insurers need to make it easy for agents and brokers.
Insurance companies, like those across many other industries, struggle with systemic issues brought on by disjointed, outdated core technologies. To help minimize the strain disconnected systems can cause, Appian invests in experts with years of first-hand experience to deliver digital solutions that can increase efficiency and improve the customer experience.
In their recent report on insurance services, ISG outlined the everlasting impact of COVID-19 on the insurance industry: “greater adoption of online and omnichannel distribution, cloud platform services, and analytics to cope with the crisis and to prepare for new ways of operating and serving customers.” With more emerging players entering the insurance market and insurers recognizing the need for providing a digital experience, consumer demands for a connected insurance experience have gr
Insurance companies have no shortage of compliance rules and regulations to keep up with these days. In my last blog, I talked about ESG requirements and the importance of agility to keep pace with demand and emerging policies. Another at the top of the list of priorities for insurers is IFRS 17.
Recent years have brought no shortage of change to the insurance industry. Among those changes is a rise in governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) requirements. Effective in May 2018, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) became the first major regulation to focus on protecting consumer data. Its implementation coupled with a global pandemic has kickstarted a rush to enact more laws surrounding data privacy.
