Page 28 - CU-20200201.pdf

FEATURE l TECH OUTLOOK
Ron Glozman CEO, Founder
Chisel AI
As profit margins shrink and customer expectations rise, finding new ways to automate high-volume, repetitive manual tasks will be key for brokers.
Successful brokers will adopt intelligent workflows, powered by AI and natural language processing, to auto- mate and digitize time-consuming, error-prone manual processes such as checking an application, submission, quote, and binder against a policy. These new technologies will pinpoint errors and omissions in seconds. They will bring new operational efficiencies, mitigate a broker’s errors and omissions (E&O) exposure, and accelerate the time it takes to issue a policy, thereby freeing up skilled knowledge workers to focus on what matters most – serving customers and growing the broker’s book of business.
In the coming year, you’ll see P&C insurance brokers and carriers doubling down on insurtech investments. Digital transformation initiatives will delve deeper into the back offices of the insurance companies, making the industry much more customer-centric. Market and competitive differentiation will no longer be based on product or price, but rather on customer experience.
Susan Johnston
Managing Director, Financial Services
Accenture Canada
Customers will be directed by insurers towards self-service digital channels, heightening the importance of customer relationship management platforms, multi-source data profiling, and predictive analytics for determining purchase patterns, needs and changes.
Insurers are now looking at how to position themselves to optimize their use of social, mobile, analytics and cloud platforms to meet the quality of service delivery that their customers expect. This expanded set of tools is also opening up the use of non-traditional partners and platforms, as companies seek to enhance their market reach.
Michael Loeters Senior Vice President, Commercial Insurance and Risk Management
Prolink
Board Director
Centre for Study of Insurance Operations
Insurers are starting to invest in AI for underwriting. This is so new to the industry that I think it’s going to take us a few years to figure it out. In 2020, for the first time, we are definitely going to see a much greater influence of this technology.
For brokers it’s going to be quite an adjustment. This will be especially true in instances when a broker thinks a client is a good risk, and yet the application gets rejected by the computer – and even the underwriter doesn’t know why. This happened to one of my clients, who was ambiguously declined. I called the underwriter to understand why, and [the underwriter] admitted to me that she never saw the submission.
A recent report predicted 80% of underwriting will be done through AI and machine learning within the next couple of years. This will potentially reduce the number of underwriters by 50%; humans will only look at appli- cations that end up in the “exception” pile. That’s going to be an interesting dynamic: now you are going to have insurers fighting over a much smaller piece of the pie.
28 February 2020 | Canadian Underwriter