The insurance industry has historically had many challenges, including an overabundance of data, manual computation of each transaction, and long, boring work hours for employees resulting in slow service. For all of these problems, exists one solution: Robotics Process Automation (RPA).

What is an RPA?

Traditionally, insurance companies either computed every transaction and its data by hand, or by bulky and unreliable APIs. These APIs produced scalability issues and requires expensive technical support, which discouraged insurance firms from upgrading, making their processes slow. The advent of RPAs erased the need for bulky upgrades or expensive remodels to the software that works to run the insurance industry smoothly 24/7.

But what can RPAs really do in the Insurance industry?

Insurance firms have a complex workflow that, if not optimised, can get extremely inefficient very fast. RPAs can be used in many places within the workflow, such as processing claims, keeping track of data, and even legal regulation. Optimising these smaller processes can cause the efficiency of an insurance firm to multiply exponentially.

Underwriting

This is the process of verification. In order to issue insurance to a client, the insurance company must first verify the client’s assets and identity. It’s a painstakingly long process involving much paperwork. Instead of manual labour, an RPA can complete the task that would typically take weeks in a matter of days.

Underwriting RPAs are typically searching RPAs which scour through databases in order to find information. An employee would still be required to manually check the results, however, the process is still exponentially optimised since the employee only has to deal with relevant data. An added bonus is that RPAs can be coded around privacy laws. Therefore, accidental breaching is impossible.

Regulation

Insurance companies are very tightly regulated by federal laws and standards. These regulations are constantly changing, and it can be hard to keep up with them. Instead of changing the human workflow every time a law changes, it is much more efficient to have a coded software robot do the job.

Just as RPAs can be coded around privacy laws, they can be programmed around all regulations that their particular task is subject to. This makes changing with regulation much easier since it only requires changing some lines of code as compared to changing entire departments around the new regulations.

Transaction Processing

Claiming insurance can be such a hassle. Thousands of papers, hundreds of phone calls, and it still takes months to process. A large insurance firm can get over a million claims a day. In a situation like this, human paper processing can turn out to be extremely inefficient. That’s where RPAs step in.

In this case, RPAs can not only help collect the data and the documents but also help to organise them. Although human supervision is still required, an automated process can boost the efficiency of claim processing by up to 75%.

Managing Data

As a large insurance company with millions of clients, there are mansions full of data to manage and process. Moreover, due to being tightly regulated, insurance companies cannot afford to have any misinformation in their databases. In a situation like this, an automated process can be invaluable.

Data managing RPAs often work with the very root of the data – data entry. If the data is entered correctly, the rest of the work becomes much easier. This is why instead of bulky APIs analysing the transactions after they happen, RPAs record the data in real-time. This not only saves time but also greatly improves accuracy.

Scalability

The scalability of software is of utmost importance for any company bothering to implement it. In the case of most insurance companies, the software is first implemented on a small process and then scaled up. This scaling is made much easier with automation. RPAs have the capability of growing or shrinking in size based on the need. Moreover, if drastically more automation is required, more robots can easily be deployed in the blink of an eye.

Upgrades

Technology is an ever-changing field where new upgrades happen every second. In order for insurance companies to keep up with this trend, the technology that they implement now must be scalable to the technology of the future.

With the current APIs in use, scalability would mean almost uprooting the whole mainframe and starting again. On the other hand, RPAs provide a much more workable solution with their building-block-like approach. RPAs can be built on top of each other. This allows for more technology to be added as it is made available.

Tracking and Analytics

An inbuilt quality of RPAs is that they track the efficiency of their own systems along with their human counterparts. This allows the insurance company to track which processes are thriving and which ones still require optimisation. This analysis can prove invaluable for large corporations. Moreover, these bots work 24/7 365 days, so there is nothing that will be left out of the analysis.

Where can I get one?

There are currently many companies working towards developing and implementing robotic process automation solutions for insurance and banking, however, UiPath and Automation Anywhere are the two leading companies that provide RPA support. These companies not only provide state of the art automated software solutions but also guarantee security and customer support.

These companies are not limited to RPAs for the insurance industry. The use cases of RPAs can span to any industry in need of automated efficiency. As technology evolves, RPAs have the capability of replacing much of the human workforce and perform any and all redundant tasks in any corporate environment.