Picture this. Every five minutes, a fraudulent insurance claim happens in the UK. That’s 300 insurance fraud cases per day!
In 2020, the Association of British Insurers (ABI) uncovered over 107,000 cases that cost insurance companies over £1.2 billion.
The Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) estimates that $40 billion is lost to fraudulent, non-health insurance claims each year in the US.
Most at risk are the insurers with older technology who gather data from multiple sources in different formats, and use manual processes and legacy systems, to store, process and govern their data.
Furthermore insurance companies with less money and fewer staff post pandemic potentially increasing their susceptibility to fraud risk.
While at the same time, the difficult economic situation and the reduced opportunity for “real” crime has seen a rise in cybercrime and fraudulent activity online.
Considering all the above, the role of automation within the insurance industry is central to effective and efficient business assurance.
You can use automation in a variety of ways.
There is a lot of information flowing through the end-to-end insurance cycle. There are many people involved in the process and oceans of structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data. Think of:
Manual governance and manual processes of this data is a massive undertaking, which can lead to human error, such as typos, inconsistencies, and present opportunities for deliberate fraud.
Automating as many of these tasks as possible helps minimize effort, time and errors.
Manual and accurate data processes is a resource heavy and time-consuming task.
This can become a bottleneck whenever demand rises, such as during a weather disaster or during policy renewal times.
Slow customer service can result in lost new business. It can also affect existing customer retention. If your competitors provide better, faster service, i.e. quicker claims processing, they will immediately or gradually defect to the competition. All of which will result in reputational damage.
System and workflow automation will help you handle varying levels of demand all year long.
As insurance companies make their services more accessible to their target audiences anytime and anywhere by digitizing them, implementing intelligent automation will facilitate this transformation and improve insurance business processes in the digital era.
You can, for instance, simplify accumulating the correct data and storing it in cost-effective, scalable, and secure cloud databases for ongoing reference.
You can then analyze, update and retrieve any customer data in real time without duplicates or mismatches. As a consequence, this will allow product personalization, speed up underwriting and renewals and enhance fraud detection.
Take Qualidex, for example. It is an automated claims data validation tool that helped a New England based Title insurance company improve its efficiency by 300%.
Qualidex collects accurate customer and claim information from digitized insurance claim forms. Detecting data errors and reducing the time and number of people needed to validate data integrity and correct errors.
Qualidex then converts the data into PDF format for further processing. It can also gather information from insurers’ websites and PDF documents containing tables, text, and numerical data. It then parses the information, analyzes it based on predetermined rules, and removes any data that may lead to false positives.
Providing digital insurance services requires that they work across multiple browsers, devices, and environments.
You also need to ensure you:
You could spend weeks or months validating all this manually. Many Quality assurance tests for insurance software require numerous repetitive tasks and are time-consuming.
Or you could automate the testing of your insurance solution using an expert team and the specialist tooling.
The right tools can help you set up, deploy, and standardize your testing across your enterprise. So, before releasing system changes to customers and/or employees, you can proactively detect issues that may result in poor customer experience, data breaches and fraud for example.
These insurance solutions and the threats to them keep on evolving. So using a continuous testing approach can help you release change faster while better protecting your company and customers.
Insurance companies looking to stay competitive should consider these benefits of automation.
If you have a trusted legacy Business Process Management (BPM) or Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) application, you may worry about most modern solutions not supporting your current workflows.
You may feel that updating your insurance solution will require a lot of time and money, which you do not currently have. You may be holding back because you believe the process may disrupt your business.
You are not alone!
That is the same situation a large personal and commercial insurance company with millions of policyholders in the UK and Europe faced.
It needed to streamline its business and replace legacy systems to respond faster to its changing market, a challenge all insurance companies face.
Implementing intelligent automation supported the seamless delivery of rapid change, delivered a faster, better customer experience. This helped boost its online sales by 30%, increased successful policy renewals, and delivered an extra 5% in revenue from new Insurance-as-a-Service offerings.
Here’s where it gets exciting.
The insurer did not have to modernize their entire legacy infrastructure immediately to start seeing tangible cost and workflow benefits. It was a journey!
Qualitest provided a managed service to support this company every step of the way. We initially recommended embedding an automation solution within the existing infrastructure.
Then we implemented a thorough shift-left enterprise automation testing solution to detect functional and non-functional issues as early as possible in the sprint cycle.
The insurer saw encouraging progress and tangible benefits, which were further enhanced as they transformed and migrated all insurance operations to the cloud. seeing a 60% reduction in cost of delivery over three years.
At Qualitest, we utilize cutting edge approaches to testing and QA, smart test automation with bespoke accelerators, and artificial intelligence to enhance rapid, risk-based testing. Our services can support you in providing an optimal and secure customer experience, with more personalized service and less business risks while speeding up the pace of change.
Our industry-leading experts will help you pick the right automated testing tools and implement the most appropriate solution for your insurance business to boost your efficiency, maintain regulatory compliance, and speed up new insurance product releases.
Talk to us today about our specialist insurance business testing solutions to see how you might realize these benefits.
