Four technology innovations that are driving the life insurance industry

The continued disruption of the insurance industry globally foretells a lot of innovation and technological advancement that seeks to fundamentally alter the experience and efficiency of insurance. The Indian insurance industry is at the forefront of this paradigm shift.

Improving penetration of insurance and extending it beyond city centers involves a concerted effort through pillars of awareness, agility, and technology. As India has progressed from basic phones to smartphones and now to high-speed 4G mobile data, insurers have found it easier to not just increase issuances, but to also impact customer satisfaction outcomes through their services, along the policy lifecycle. Here are four major thrusts of technology innovation in the life insurance sector that have contributed to innovation in the industry in recent years:

Data mining to unlock value for customers

The wealth of data sitting inside the silos of insurance companies is now being mined and used by advanced artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) technologies to offer customer insights. This is helping in bringing customized insurance products as per the consumers’ preference, develop business models, and reduce frauds by flagging potential red areas in a geographical region or within a customer segment.

Enhancing service experience of customers

Technology has shaped the service experience of the customer down to the last Some of the interventions in this space include providing transaction and resolution on mobile devices to create an experience of having an office/service touch point on the go. The video- calling service is integrated across physical and digital customer touch-points including branch, customer portal, and mobile app. This takes the service experience of customers a notch higher, as they can avail a wide range of services at their fingertips, which were earlier offered at a physical branch.

Integrating intelligence across processes and platforms.

All insurers today are working on integrating AI across workflow processes to offer an integrated experience to all stakeholders with minimal friction. For instance, all interactions with customers can be tapped into one system that becomes a central intelligence repository, which makes it easy for the insurers to track a customer’s engagement and improve underwriting by leveraging additional data. Additionally, apps and dashboards for both the end-customer as well as insurance consultants are increasingly becoming commonplace as insurers seek to reach their customers where they are, and offer them necessary information on one-click, thus improving the overall service experience for stakeholders.

Smarter risk monitoring

With the deployment of ML-based AI models, insurers are now able to detect frauds early in the policy tenure. One such initiative run in-house is live verification using AI, which ranks applications/policies based on certain risk scores assigned to them. Policies that rank as high- risk are subsequently subject to higher due diligence either before or after policy issuance. Such rankings are an outcome of insurers’ actual experience and industry learnings, fine-tuned using data analytics. These interventions reduce the overall leakage and make insurance safer and cheaper for all stakeholders.

An EY global survey found that 80 percent of customers are willing to use digital and remote channels for conducting financial tasks and transactions. This is an encouraging sign for the industry as customers are becoming more comfortable with technology. Insurers who continue to enhance their technology stack to automate processes for providing faster services and seamless customer experience will truly be seen as traversing the journey of becoming future-ready and getting customers’ life goals done.