Commercial insurance companies looking to automate the insurance submission request process may get a boost from a joint project Google Cloud and The Travelers Companies are working on. Their project is focused on cloud-based data and analytics tools that promise to help insurance companies get to risk selection faster with improved decision-making and loss ratios.
Coupled with recent developments in artificial intelligence tools that help automate the underwriting submission intake process, it’s a development could help insurance companies better deal with the onslaught of requests for new policies.
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Insurance database with millions of data points
According to a recent Insurance Journal story, the data ecosystem Google Cloud and Travelers are working on will “securely integrate millions of structured and unstructured data points from multiple sources—internal and external—and leverage artificial intelligence and advanced analytics to give underwriters a clearer picture of a prospective account’s risk profile. This will accelerate the quoting process for agents and customers.”
Such a development would be good news for commercial insurance companies that currently struggle to keep up with broker submissions. As noted in a recent blog post, many insurance companies are currently unable to process submissions near fast enough to actually quote on all the business in front of them.
It’s becoming clear that it will take a mix of technology partnerships to help address the issue, with the Google/Travelers project being just one. Consider the insuretech software and service provider Guidewire, which counts more than 20 other vendors (including Indico Data) and 18,900 technology consultants, systems integrators, and solution providers as part of its overall partner program.
The reason is because no single company can address on its own the scope of the various issues insurers face.
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Automating underwriting insurance submission
Consider the task of automating the underwriting submission intake process. While analytics tools are certainly helpful in making informed underwriting decisions, they don’t address the nagging problem of how to deal with broker submissions that arrive via email, as most do.
Each of those emails must be read to determine whether the request is for net-new business or a renewal. And each email typically includes numerous attachments, often in one large file. That file must also be read to determine what documents it includes, categorize and extract each one, and pull out relevant data for input to an appropriate downstream system.
All of that takes time, which is why many insurers can’t keep up with the volume of insurance submission intake requests. What they need is an unstructured data intake platform that can read and classify emails, unbundle attachments and classify them as well.
Ideally, that platform should also be able to extract key data from each of these documents and feed it to a downstream underwriting tool. At that point, the same underwriting tool could access tools offered by other players in the insurance ecosystem, such as an underwriting analytics engine like what Google and Travelers are proposing. By marrying the data extracted from the actual submission with historical data and AI capabilities, insurance companies could get more input to its decision-making process faster than ever before.
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Increase insurance process capacity with automation
The combination of an intelligent automation platform and cloud-based AI decision-making tools could go a long way toward automating the insurance submission request process. Insurance companies would be able to generate more new business premiums even while improving loss ratios, the result of access to better data.
And with automation, insurers would be able to garner all these benefits, including increased capacity to process submission requests, without increasing headcount. So, more profit from the same people.
Learn more about how the Indico Unstructured Data Platform can help you automate underwriting insurance submission processes to improve underwriting profitability and reduce that submission backlog. Check out our reference guide on property & casualty insurance, contact us with any questions, or schedule a demo to see what the intelligent automation can do for you.
