The Impact of RPA in Insurance Industries in UAE
Vimal Ramachandran, Director
Phone:- +971 4 327 7775
Mobile:- +971 52 830 7998
WhatsApp:- +971 56 219 1607
Email:- dubai@hlbhamt.com
Robotic Process Automation has been helpful in transforming many industries in the last few years. The automation of mundane and repetitive human tasks has helped companies to focus their employee’s energy on high-value tasks. Insurance firms, which handle a large amount of data, can be a perfect use case for the RPA implementation. The scope of AI-powered robotic bots and the concept of digital worker is gaining extreme significance among the leaders of Insurance firms. This is mainly due to the presence of monotonous & time-consuming manual jobs which inversely affect the delivery process and lead to customer dissatisfaction. In this article, I will be talking about our experience with implementing RPA at leading insurance firms in the UAE. Routine operation tasks are automated and has led companies to be more efficient and customer-centric.
What were the existing bottlenecks for RPA implementation in the Insurance industry?
RPA can streamline the data processing and make it much faster and error-free. The first question when an insurance firm decide to do RPA is where to start? What are the major time-consuming jobs? Where does company can save the operational costs the maximum and increase productivity? And most importantly which all processes are subjected to maximum human errors? At HLB HAMT, our experienced RPA consultants can help you in choosing the right service to automate. This involves many steps such as meeting all stakeholders, auditing your current processes, etc.
Another bottleneck is the overdependency on data from legacy systems. This data might be inside these systems for years, and sometimes decades. One of the biggest advantages of RPA systems is that it can interact with any data formats. This can help deal in cutting human expenditures caused due to system updates. Besides, if you decide to migrate from legacy systems, our cloud transformation service can be of help anytime.
Most companies will be lacking the skillset and training for handling RPA systems. This is one of the reasons why many companies refrain themselves from opting for new technologies. But RPA is one technology that does not require any special skillset or infrastructure. Yes, there are certain processes you should adopt but any layman can understand the same with ease.
The fourth bottleneck in my opinion, and this is the most crucial part of an RPA adoption in UAE is to overcome the reluctancy towards change management. Most people will be comfortable in a cocoon shell that they have been following for years. At each stage of the RPA implementation, proper training, documentation, and awareness programs will be conducted to all employees to make them comfortable with the new scenarios.
RPA in Insurance: Present & Future Use Cases
COVID-19 has changed a lot of scenarios for the insurance industry, especially now with lot of employees working from home, handling high volumes of transactions online has become a challenge. Although many insurance companies have opted for RPA and digital transformation even prior to the pandemic, the process got accelerated the adopted volume and particularly RPA being expanded to several use cases. Although it is a known fact that RPA can increase turnaround time, increase accuracy & efficiency, from our experience RPA can be perfect for risk predictions and connecting with the end customer. There is no doubt that RPA can revolutionize the insurance industry creating a lot of high-value jobs for the employees.
With HLB HAMT, you can automate lot of your lengthy and mundane daily chores through RPA. As you might know RPA uses a combination of Machine Language & Artificial Intelligence and can automate a large chunk of repetitive human tasks and that too in a very short time.
Let us look at few of the cases we have automated with RPA for our insurance industry clients in UAE.
Handling Claims Processing
One of the most frequent yet time-consuming tasks in the insurance field is the claim processing one. Employees usually must collect information about the client including their documents and this may involve getting data from multiple systems. Usually, this takes a lot of time and the delay can frustrate the end customer. Insurance is one are where no one like to wait as in most cases it will be an emergency request. Such collection of large quantities of data from various systems can be performed easily by the RPA. Moreover, it can handle many claims at once, something which is clearly not possible with manual procession. The evolution of AI is making these process more accurate and clients are enjoying quick responses to their claims. Not only data collection and extraction, but RPA can also be helpful in error tracking, verification of claims, integration with third-party data resources, etc.
Handling Policy Administration
All the existing policy administrative systems in the UAE are of legacy types and are costly to maintain. There are a lot of policy administrative functions, like quotation, rating, underwriting and customer care which can take lot of your operation time and manhours. The industry is ever so changing and the expectation of each customer varies. With RPA all administrative activities such as risk capture, credit controlling, settling accounts, taxations, etc. can be done quickly and more importantly in an error-free manner.
Managing Policy Cancellation
Personally, I have found this process to be extremely time-consuming and frustrating with insurance companies. If you look at the back end, there are hundreds of processes happening, from a host of emails, tallying cancellation & inception dates, checking policy terms, interactions with admin and CRM systems, etc. The time taken for the lookup is the sole reason of the delay, with RPA, Insurance companies can speed up this process as the checking happens in a swift second across systems and if everything is correct, can go ahead with the policy cancellation. From our experience, we can say that, our clients now handle a cancellation request with just one-third of the time comparing to the pre-RPA scenario.
Automating Underwriting
Evaluating the risks associated with insuring people and assets has always the issue of your client data getting exposed. Again, we are talking about a large substantial amount of data here. Usually from our interaction with our clients, this is a lengthy process and can take anywhere between two to three weeks on an average to complete this process. The process involves assessing the risk via information from multiple sources, scrambling & analyzing of data, etc. With the help of RPA, data collection process from all types of sources is quick and with the help of AI, all relevant information corresponding to a particular policy are put forward and a report can be generated. This report can contain all necessary info and recommendations.
Ensuring Compliance
Dubai and other Emirates are extremely vigilant and provides strict guidelines for the insurance sector in terms of data privacy and security. The laws get updated at a very quick pace and it is important for the insurance firms to stay par with all the updates. Any noncompliance with the privacy laws, can result in hefty fines and other legal consequences. Manual works can be error-prone, especially, in the case of work documentation, audit trail creations, the chances of error creeping are multifold. With RPA, the BOTS can be pre-programmed with all necessary compliances, therefore, saving a lot of manual time in due process. Regular jobs such as customer information validation, report generation, sending notification alerts, etc. can be automated via RPA.
Performance Measurement
The first thing that many decision-makers of leading insurance firms tell us is that they are not able to get accurate and centralized information from the ground level of operations. Lot of manual works might not be recordical and is difficult to keep a track on for a quantifiable measuring index of the overall efficiency. This is mainly due to the numerous paperwork one must scrutinize to have that measurement in place. With RPA, it is easy to track as all the tasks conducted by BOTS are logged properly. The overall areas which need improvement can be found out with the help of these audit trails. Moreover, the data collected from all the levels can be centralized and converted into a dashboard for better analyzing.
Miscellaneous Functions
Apart from the above functions, RPA can reduce around 40% of time in form registration process in insurance companies, can automate legal and credit checks along with creating sales scorecards and sending notification alerts to agents. With well-programmed BOTS, one can automate finance and accounts functionalities such as bank reconciliations and register transactional expenses.
As I had mentioned earlier, there will be a lot of companies relying heavily on legacy ERP or CRM apps. What RPA can do is easily integrate with these legacy systems and create a similar workflow as a manual one.
Future technologies trending in UAE
Our in-house RPA developers are adding more features everyday into the already impressive RPA solutions roster for Insurance industry. Recently, we did a solution based on image classification technology for settling claims and an OCR-based text extraction for handling customer policy extensions. The advent of blockchain-based technologies will increase data security by many folds along with RPA.
We at HLB HAMT believe RPA is “the” most perfectly fit technology for the insurance industry as we can automate end-to-end processes easily. Moreover, BOTS can never be tired, and be able to work 24*7 without a drop in accuracy is also a welcome thought. The daily chores and processes can be standardized which can lead to an increase in operational efficiency. The whole RPA installation processes hardly take any time and can work in sync with your existing IT infrastructure. Our expert consultants can train your team regarding how RPA application works in a matter of a couple of hours.
Again, as I mentioned in the beginning, change management is something that must be seriously looked at. I agree it will be difficult for the employees to embrace a new technology initially, but guess, once they start using RPA, they would realize that they can use their skill for higher-value jobs in the company. Moreover, all this process automation can reduce the wait times and keep the end customer happy, and keeping your customer happy means, good times for your company!!!
For any information related to installing RPA in Insurance industry, get in touch with our experts!!!
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