For incumbents like Manulife, with 22 businesses across 18 markets and a pedigree that stretches back 140 years, AI tools are being used to ‘supercharge transformation’. From synthesizing and analyzing customer conversation transcripts to tagging and tracking all digital properties and assets, the company has collected data from every touch point and customer interaction to map a quantified customer journey.
‘It means we know where we are lagging behind so we can find focused improvement opportunities,’ said Parin Kothari, AVP, Digital Transformation at Manulife, stressing the importance of putting ‘data into action through a stack of analytics infrastructure’, whether that’s an off-the-shelf customer data platform or inhouse models.
Cloud can easily scale, it’s super flexible, really interoperable and it makes so much sense from a cost perspective - our IT costs, including salaries, are less than 1% of top line premium.
With insurers under pressure to do more with less, the potential savings up for grabs through new digital technologies, be they cloud or increased automation, may appear compelling. But according to Bradley Purnhagen, Head of Breakthrough Innovation at Cincinnati Insurance, there are no short cuts to operational transformation.
RPA is a tremendous opportunity but if the process is bad and you automate it, it’s still a bad process.
Take, for example, the distribution of life insurance, which is a highly fragmented, time-consuming and frustrating process. With no quick fix in sight, Pacific Life Re built an entirely new point of sale underwriting platform that aggregates and simplifies the process for agents and advisors to make their lives easier and help them serve more customers. The result was UnderwriteMe, a platform which synthesizes all the different carrier requirements so agents have to deal with one system, one log-in and one application. Daniel Hermansson, Pacific Re’s AVP of Corporate Strategy, said reflexive technology makes this data capture a manageable experience.
‘There are now over a dozen carriers signed up and last year 20% of UK term life insurance was processed through the UnderwriteMe platform,’ he said, adding that the focus now is to streamline applications for those who, due to age or medical requirements, can’t access the accelerated process. This will involve turning to new data sources, such as electronic health records and data from wearables.
Using data and digital technologies to remove pain points and streamline operations is essential – and not just because of costs. As younger generations, with their on-demand expectations, become major consumers of insurance, it’s clear that seamless onboarding, accelerated underwriting, personalized CX and instant decisioning are going to be table stakes in the very near future, if they’re not already. Only AI and digital technology can close this capability gap at speed.
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