Tech Trends in Three: An interview with life insurance executive Bronwyn Kirwan
Based in Auckland, New Zealand, Bronwyn Kirwan has built a career in life insurance--beginning at age 20. Throughout her experience in the field, which has spanned multiple countries and includes a stint in reinsurance, she has been a part of planning and managing the impact technology has made on insurance organizations. Currently serving as Chief Sales and Service Officer at a large New Zealand life insurance provider, Bronwyn sat down with TCG Process to discuss the life insurance market, how it’s changed over the last decade, and how technology has changed not only the way consumers interact with insurers, but how that change has required them to adapt processes internally.
What three global themes do you see overall in the insurance industry?
One of the big areas drawing a lot of attention is how to collect, use and maintain customer data, especially within emerging regulatory frameworks for customer data sharing. It’s a vitally important part of both ensuring a good customer experience and managing risk for the insurer but it can be difficult to maintain a single source of truth when the information comes in from so many different sources, both internal and external. How do insurers put it all together while maintaining compliance? Think about it: customers call, they send emails and upload documents and pictures from mobile apps, but insurers also typically work with sales organizations and reinsurers--and all these entities and channels contribute information about the customer. Solutions for intelligent document processing are often key to insurance providers to improve and automate the way they work with this incoming customer information.
Another trend at the moment is omni-channel interoperability. Let's consider the various sources and channels in which insurers receive information about customers, as I talked about before. All that information feeds a broad variety of insurance software systems. Insurers and their business processes and employees need access to that data for decision making, but each system has to ingest the data a bit differently. They need a single customer language, so to speak. So, insurance companies are increasingly starting to talk about interoperability (or sharing) for customer data points. Insurers need to get and retain the data in a standard way, which is achieved through those intelligent document processing solutions I mentioned. Once information is collected and standardized, it is interoperable so it can be used with external parties across the value chain—reinsurers, insurers, brokers and other intermediaries, for example. These discussions have been interesting to see, and of course a key consideration is always how we ensure customer consent to use the data in the right way. But it all starts with getting accurate data in the first place, and that’s where technology, like intelligent document processing, comes in.
What is intelligent document processing?
Finally, it would be remiss of me not to mention the continued trend towards improved consumer protections. This a very positive and progressive shift to a place where consumers can rely on sets of codified rules for insurers to live by. Some of these regulations encompass important service-related obligations such as claim response times, ensuring the customer receives communication and updates regularly on the status of their claim. This significantly impacts the speed with which insurers need to gather information from customers and communicate either their decision or what further documentation they need to make a decision. And I think this will become a global trend over time, not only limited to Australia where it is currently being seen. If we think about it from a process design perspective, it starts with an ingestion process, collecting all of that information into a unified, automated process for understanding what it means in the shortest amount of time. Once that data is understood, it can be used to do all sorts of things like automated responses thanking a customer for submitting their info. It can also be used to promptly identify a missing document or data point, and automatically request that the customer resubmit what’s needed. This gives the customer the sense they have been heard, and progress is actively being made on their request. Regulatory requirements are satisfied, but there’s an additional benefit of customer confidence and trust.
How does technology play a role in insurance’s current trends or drive others in the insurance space?
The focus on data, and the move towards operating in a data-driven way, is probably prevalent in every technology consideration an insurer makes. Data cannot be made interoperable until it is processed and understood, along with the context in which it is received. This means that technologies that support data ingestion and recognition from any and all sources like mobile devices and web portals are key, as you have to get your hands on the information digitally to make it interoperable and truly extract its value.
We’re seeing an increased use of chat bots + robots making their way into the customer experience. Chat bots are almost bionic today with improved use of technology like AI (artificial intelligence), not like the old days where you would get a fairly non-human, dissatisfying experience. The way technology has advanced means chat bot experiences now feel very human. And they’ve been extended beyond just a pop up on the homepage, bots are being used everywhere, adding context to customer interactions from underwriting to claims. But these bots still need access to and understanding of the information customers are submitting as part of this experience.
RegTech, or regulatory technology, has seen significant growth in the insurance market in the last decade. This is being accelerated by new regulation, particularly in Australia where a substantial program of regulatory reforms have characterized the past 6-8 years. The regulatory environment is complex and operating compliantly across a tapestry of legislated and non-legislated regulations is challenging.
And there are so many regulatory areas where technology can--and should--play a role. Triaging of customer correspondence is another. Often customer communications are relied on for regulatory certainty. If you can automate receipt of those communications, and understand what is being said (understand the data), insurers enjoy much more control and consistency in their handling of that correspondence. Often this type of automation is provided by software platforms that intelligently, with the use of AI and machine learning, normalize the chaotic way in which customers submit communications and correspondence. This is sometimes called a digital mailroom. These software solutions help with that triage of incoming documents, and then inspect what data is there, validating information along the way and integrating that data—in an interoperable way—to back-end systems when and where they need it. Not only does it satisfy regulatory concerns, but often insurers will see a 30-70% reduction in operating costs versus the manual processing they are doing today. I suspect these types of software, typically called intelligent document processing solutions, will see increased investment from insurers in the coming years.
Customer experience has been a hot topic in many industries--but especially insurance--for a long time, and each of the topics we’ve discussed touches that customer experience. The customer acquisition and claims processes both seem to have a lot of room for improvement. Is this something you see in the life insurance realm?
Yes, absolutely. Customer sentiment and experience looks quite similar across all insurance practices: first, there is inherent distrust from the customer, and second, lengthy processes in both applying for insurance and processing claims. Technology is available today to remove the friction from the buying process and the customer claims experience, but insurers need to implement the right solution to see the biggest benefit.
There are three main channels by which customers come to a life insurance purchase: directly, via a bank or through an intermediary such as a financial adviser. All are beset with friction. Submitting an application is an early part of the customer’s experience and that involves underwriting. This involves a large volume of information – sometimes digital, sometimes paper and sometimes multiple to-and-fro communications with the customer and key parties such as their general practitioner, accountant, and/or lawyer. As any underwriter will know, page turning—whether that be digital or paper—to identify the information required to assess the risk takes time. But it also takes skill, someone who understands the medical jargon or knows what medical codes are important. Not only is it time consuming and means a delay for the customer, but it also comes at a pretty big expense to the insurer. However, IDP technology can help.
The process of submitting this information has become more digital, but the process of helping the underwriting team identify the right data points on which to make a decision is still a bottleneck. And one that is open to improvement, which would be win-win for the customer and the insurer.
Insurance organizations face a host of challenges as data and information grows, data privacy regulations are refined and interoperability among internal legacy systems becomes paramount to quick and efficient processing of customer information. TCG Process has helped insurers around the world to gain control over this valuable data. How do we do it? Read more here.
