The insurance industry is competitive. Insurers today need effective methods for processing underwriting tasks, identifying insurance needs, verifying information, and improving the customer experience.
Robotic process automation (or RPA) empowers insurers to achieve improved productivity and efficiency to stay competitive. By automating repetitive tasks, you can free up hours daily that your team can spend on high-value jobs supporting business growth.
Read on to learn more about how RPA works in insurance underwriting and how it helps you save time, money, and effort.
Robotic Process Automation in Insurance Underwriting: How It Works
RPA is a rule-based, low-code technology that can automate manual tasks otherwise performed by humans.
Since RPA requires minimal coding — it works directly in applications on the user interface — it’s an excellent choice for insurance companies that use legacy systems. RPA is compatible with many applications, making this approach to automation easy and affordable to implement.
As an industry, insurance is perfect for RPA since it’s already process-driven. Insurance companies can use the technology to build elaborate and well-planned processes for their every need. and rest assured that their compliance with regulatory standards is always upheld.
If most of your processes still rely on outdated or manual systems, it’s time to make a change. Robotic process automation insurance underwriting can help you compete in the digital age and keep pace with changing customer needs.
RPA in Insurance: Why You Need It
Sticking to manual processes risks slowing down your operations in several ways. Here are a few reasons underwriters need to leverage RPA:
Checking multiple sources takes too much time
Traditionally, underwriters must check multiple sources to retrieve and verify insurance application data. Constantly shifting between different websites and excel spreadsheets places unnecessary obstacles in front of your team, breaks their concentration, and hinders their ability to make time-efficient insurance decisions. In fact, we discussed in a recent presentation how we found that underwriters can waste approximately three hours performing manual admin tasks (such as logging into third-party databases) per case.
In contrast, RPA can gather information from multiple internal and external sources in seconds. For example, Insly’s Virtual Underwriting Assistant automatically pulls data from sanctions/flood/credit check databases and presents it on a central customer application screen. With key information visualised in one place, underwriters can reach their decisions faster and streamline their workload.
Need for accuracy in collating and checking data
Where there’s a human element, there’s a risk for human error. Collecting and analysing mountains of data increases the risk of missed details, incorrect information, or other issues.
RPA eliminates the risk of human error by accurately extracting information from customer documents and updating applications as necessary.
Repetitive tasks drain time, money, and morale
Between application reviews, KYC processing, and underwriting, your employees spend much of their time on admin tasks that have little to do with the specialised role of an underwriter.
Processes like copying documents, updating information across software, exporting policy paperwork etc. are critical. However, these tasks risk draining your team’s time, energy, and morale.
RPA in insurance underwriting tools can help eliminate all minute admin tasks that soon start to eat into an underwriter’s day. Insly’s platform, for example, can boost productivity by automatically sending out renewal reminders to customers. It can also sync information updates across multiple software systems and generate complete insurance policy documentation with one click. Saving your employees from performing these tasks will have a transformative impact on their productivity and satisfaction.
Optimises decision-making to expand operations
Applying automation to underwriting or process rules can create uniformity and steadiness in decision-making. Insly’s software, for example, will collect the relevant BI data you need to make informed decisions about your business.
In addition, with RPA handling most of the process work, it gives you more flexibility to expand your operations and scale your business. RPA in insurance underwriting platforms can easily be scaled up as your company grows, meaning you won’t need to hire more people to manage the workload. For an illustrative example, Insly’s underwriting tools can automatically underwrite ‘cookie cutter’ applications. It works using safeguarded RPA workflows which can handle the application process from start to finish and trigger referrals or extra considerations where necessary.
You can also ensure that your RPA processes are transferable to partnering firms’ systems. Insly’s API-native setup is designed for secure, easy integration across both modern and legacy IT infrastructure.
Helps you maintain flawless financial records
RPA can improve your business’s financial reporting processes by gathering all accounting information and sending it to your accounts team with one click.
Insly’s double-entry ledger and premium accounting tools can track all premiums coming into and leaving your accounts. It also offers multi-currency support for processing international payments and invoices. It can also generate P&L reports, and you can even build custom BI reports to analyse the KPIs that matter most to your business.
Discover the True Benefits of RPA in Insurance Underwriting
Insly provides fully extensible software solutions that you can combine with your own custom modules. Using our platform, you can simplify and completely automate many tasks required to run a successful insurance business.
With over 20 years of experience in the insurtech industry and collaborating with leading insurance automation experts, Insly can help build future-proof solutions for all insurance providers.
To find out more, check out our Case Studies and get in touch with the team.
