As the insurance industry undergoes a mammoth shift, the effects are being felt across every major process. Companies have made large-scale investments in modernizing and evolving claims and processing platforms. Underwriting being a crucial function in evaluating and analyzing the company’s financial performance is increasingly gaining the traction of businesses. It is no longer “just” confined to underwriters. Intensifying competition, rising customer expectations, and cost pressures have forced insurers to expand the value proposition of underwriting and redirect its imperative role in the insurance industry.

Insurance companies are witnessing a clear upside in the evolution of the underwriting function away from its traditional transactional focus. It is time for the industry to leverage disruptive technology tools and transform underwriting.

The need for a process evolution

With market dynamics evolving at a rapid pace, let’ have a close look at the key factors propelling the insurance industry to advance their underwriting function:

Rise in data
80% of the data received by underwriters is unstructured, residing in the form of emails, PDFs, forms, and images. Extracting meaningful information from these data sources and documents proves to be a herculean task. It dials down the efficiency of the underwriting team while increasing the processing time and potentially weakening risk assessment.
Higher customer expectations
With the advent of new technologies, the display of an omnichannel (or channel-agnostic) behavior by customers has become prominent. Insurers are compelled to deploy digitally adept methods to set new benchmarks of quality and keep up with customer expectations. They require ways to minimize the customer waiting time that consumes at least 95% of the insurance application processing time.
New competitors
As customer expectations and market dynamics evolve, digital agility is imperative for organizations to respond quickly to changing market opportunities, shifting attitudes, and risks across the insurance value chain. Insurers unable to adapt to this reality are more likely to lose a competitive edge in the marketplace.

Most insurance companies face considerable gaps between current capabilities and requirements. Underwriters are plagued with multiple challenges, creating the need for advanced digital technologies.

How is AI changing the value proposition for underwriting?

While the above-mentioned challenges seem difficult to scale, AI has demonstrated its ability to reduce them to mere milestones. Adopting a ‘bottom-up’ approach and evaluating the entire lifecycle through pain-points of an underwriter will enable insurers to harness the power of digital technology and optimize the existing underwriting process.

The incorporation of AI and ML allows companies to revamp legacy processes according to modern-day needs. Automation eradicates the drawbacks that the traditional approach had and helps insurers to focus on key performance areas. The advent of digital technologies in these areas has opened avenues for InsurTech startups to leverage AI chatbots to handle claims and use data and software to build customer profiles for informed decision-making.

Quantiphi also offers a suite of AI integrated solutions to help businesses simplify the underwriting journey and amplify:

Submission Intake
Quality and Eligibility Check
Risk Assessment
Onboarding

With AI and ML focusing on these four key areas, the underwriters can dedicate their resources and time to focus on other critical decision-making processes or claims that need their attention. This will improve overall customer retention and reduce the time spent on addressing customer claims.

How Quantiphi can enhance the underwriting value chain?

Quantiphi can help traditional insurance companies leverage digital technologies such as machine learning and intelligent solutions to keep up with changing customer expectations. It can evolve the core of insurance operations and help businesses establish their name in this dynamically evolving market through cutting-edge tools and technologies.

While we do agree that every insurance company follows its standard procedures and processes based on the value system, we at Quantiphi ensure to provide a tailor-based AI solution to help insurers achieve their overall business objectives. To learn more about our differentiated solutions that have helped insurance companies evolve the underwriting process, visit our solutions.