How Does Automated Underwriting Work for Insurance?

If you have been evaluating the insurance industry’s digital transformation and how it can improve your insurance agency, you’ve likely heard about automated underwriting.

Assessing risk and pricing insurance policies, especially commercial policies, is highly complex, requiring detailed analysis of many documents by an expert who determines the correct type of coverage at the right price for the customer.

You might think that underwriting is too complex and detail-oriented to automate. But when done right, automated insurance underwriting is one of the most beneficial transitions that your company can make to increase accuracy, reduce the time it takes to create new policies, and improve customer satisfaction.

Challenges for Insurance Underwriters Without Underwriting Process Automation

If your company is underwriting policies without insurance process automation, you’re probably facing some significant obstacles. One of the biggest challenges for underwriters is that 50% or more of their job is spent gathering data or completing repetitive tasks unless there are automations in place to make this an easier task.

Once the data is entered, there is a lot of work to be done to create a policy, especially focused on assessing risk. There are a lot of factors to be considered and simulations to run. This is time consuming and slows down the process of completing high-value insurance policies.

What Can You Automate for Insurance Policy Underwriting?

One of the easiest places to start when adding RPA and AI for underwriting tasks is data collection. Your customer can enter documents, records, or forms. The information in these documents can be extracted and automatically entered into the system the underwriter is using to assess risk and create policies.

Once the underwriter has all of the required information added to the software, the risk level assessment can begin.

Microsoft Azure for Insurance can be added to make simulations quick and easy to run. This will help get to the final policy terms much quicker and will ensure that various regulations are being followed.

Related reading: How to Use Microsoft Products to Automate Insurance Processes.

Customers are happier because they can get their policy sooner, and you’re able to produce more policies in a shorter time with these automations in place.

5 Benefits of Process Automation for Insurance Underwriting

As you read through the benefits, think about how your current system is structured to see if automation could be right for you.

1. Process automation underwriting for insurance streamlines the customer experience.
   
   Customers prefer the automated processes for submitting necessary information. The automated underwriting system will tell the customer what is needed and track what has been submitted. It can even check to be sure the right data was included on the document submitted.
   
   
2. Underwriters can spend time on more critical functions of underwriting required of an insurance expert.
   
   In the past, the solution to freeing up the underwriter was to add data entry staff. This is a costly activity that has constant turnover, training, etc. By allowing the customers to submit most of the information themselves, and extracting data automatically, you can also avoid the need to hire a lot of data entry staff or ask your underwriter to spend time on tracking down pieces of data.
   
   
3. More consistent assessment of risk level.
   
   Using tools like Microsoft Azure to assess risk removes potential bias or error and produces consistent results across all of your customers.
   
   
4. Automatically populates sales systems as well as other internal systems used by the insurance company.
   
   The work completed by the underwriter can be automatically sent to the other internal systems, such as the CRM, so that other departments can assist the customer if needed. Policy information that is automatically entered is also available to run reports for sales, performance reports for the underwriting team, etc.
   
   
5. It helps insurance organizations increase revenue by processing more policies in a given period.
   
   Speeding up the underwriting process helps to turn your potential clients into customers in record time. This helps to improve profitability so you can outcompete the competition in your market.

You may also be interested in reading: How Does RPA for Insurance Increase Profitability?

Next Steps for Automating Your Insurance Company’s Underwriting Processes

At Integratz, we understand the issues that your underwriting team is facing. We also know that more policies mean that you bring in more revenue. As one of the most critical functions of the entire company, enhancing the underwriting team’s ability to get their job done correctly and efficiently will pay off greatly in the long run.

Because every insurance company is different, we can help you assess what you have now and what would help you achieve these efficiencies.

Please schedule a consultation with our insurance underwriting automation experts today. We can help you create a plan that will help you scale faster.