Intelligent Ingestion: The Beginning Of Commercial Digital Insurance | insurance blog clicksud.us

For over a decade we have pretended to be paperless. We boast the fact that file cabinets, 7-part special file folders, and massive mail rooms have all been removed and downsized, and claim that we are paperless. But we know it’s not real. Today’s paper is pdf, excel and adobe. Filing cabinets have been replaced with digital folders and mail rooms with email and digital workflows. But the truth is that we are kidding ourselves. Insurance is not paperless; It only pretends to be. Still this should not happen. The technology to actually go digital does exist. We just need to take the leap.

One of the biggest barriers to being truly digital, as opposed to having a digital paper industry, involves the initial ingestion or digitization of data. We’ve had advanced OCR and computer vision solutions for a while. These have been great at extracting information from digital forms and standardized templates, but have not been sufficient to meet the needs of more complex undertakings such as commercial insurance presentations.

The typical commercial insurance new business submission or quote request may include an application, loss run, statement of values, certificate of insurance, financial statements and many other documents depending on the type of insurance. A typical commercial insurance submission will include 300-500 pieces of information. Information that is invaluable in understanding, valuing and quoting a piece of business.

Untapped potential of dark data

Our process for extracting data from these submissions is out of date today. A typical process involves routing submissions to a low-cost resource, often offshore, that will extract a minimal set of fields to set up the submission and some basic rating information. On a good day they can extract and convert 50 of the 500 pieces of information they enter into the system into digital data. The rest of the documents are left as dark data. Data that is held by the carrier but is never digitally exposed or available. Then the electronic file carrying the electronic documents is sent to the underwriters where these digital documents are opened again and again due to unavailability of data. It’s the same process as it was 300 years ago, except with file folders and documents made of bits and bytes instead of paper and ink.

It doesn t have to be that way. We have seen what insurance can become with speed, efficiency and accuracy when the process is simple and digital for individuals with similar risks, but there is promise for more complex insurance such as group benefit, commercial line and specialty insurance . And that starts with being able to digitally ingest the data.

And that’s where we’ve seen the technological leap. With the integration of more advanced machine learning tools that can combine natural language processing with computer vision, data can now be extracted from both structured and unstructured documents with high accuracy and speed. In fact, it is one of the most emerging technology sectors in insurance today with a wide range of players and investors. Take the case of a life insurer in China that has deployed an intelligent risk control system that enables end-to-end automation of insurance applications. (page 11, fuel the future of insurance,

learn from rising leaders

One of the other emerging leaders in this space is a company called foreign Ministry out of the UK. What makes MEA unique is that it was founded by insurance executives who understand the unique challenges involved in complex insurance documents as well as a critical understanding of the terminologies, variability and complexity involved. Their solution has focused specifically on deep expertise and building a comprehensive insurance-specific extraction catalog around core insurance concepts, starting with submission documents which allows their solution to be adapted to new insurance areas very quickly. Is. The best part is that because their team understands insurance in depth, you do not need to train their team about insurance in order to work with them.

We have worked with the State Department on a number of engagements and trials across Europe and the US. The breadth of their solution has allowed us to evaluate a wide range of businesses, business processes, and insurance entities, including carriers, MGAs, and brokers. We have found that they can consistently compete in terms of speed, accuracy and quality in their testing and execution. It is actually possible to use this type of solution from evaluation in just a few months.

So, what does this mean for our digital paper world today? Well, this means that insurers now have a real option to embark on a digital journey. This has been the hope and dream for some time, but technology has really caught up with the vision of going digital – starting with intelligent ingestion.

creating truly touchless processes

Now there are many different ways to employ this. It starts by identifying the pseudo-paperless process that exists in your organization today and targeting the documents it receives. Submission is an obvious choice, but claims, thresholds, invoice receipts, audits, etc. are also possible. Then design how you want the digital process to work. You can choose to ingest and process the data directly or take a more cautious approach that still includes some level of human review or human insight. The choice should depend on the complexity and importance of the data and your convenience with implementing it, but in the long run you should expect that at least some part of your ingestion will be touchless. The other decision to make is whether you’re only going to extract the data you use today or do you want to extract everything in the document. This is 50 vs 500 questions for submission. But doing so may require some other changes and other technologies to aid a true digital transformation. We’ll discuss those elements in a future blog.

In the meantime, though, isn’t it time your insurance process wasn’t from the 17th century? Isn’t it time we moved to building truly digital processes with digital paper in email and workflow systems? Isn’t it time to start building your company’s intelligent ingestion solution? Let’s start building real digital insurance.