The insurance industry is undergoing tremendous transformation across the globe with competition jostling for a footing in the marketplace. In a marketplace such as the Indian subcontinent, digital transformation initiatives often translate into billions of dollars.
However, the emergence of new-age technologies has brought about a fundamental shift in how insurers approach Business Process Management (BPM). This shift has brought forward a unique set of challenges for insurers, who today scramble to integrate new age technologies while still depending on their legacy systems and isolated applications to cater to various insurance processes.
BPM platforms are now being used to tie together the old and the new.They create a layer that joins the legacy system & isolated applications, while offering integration with new age technologies like RPA, Analytics, Rules Engines, ML and Digital Sensing. Let us look at some of the key benefits of a BPM based insurance platform.
Unifying Insurance Processes
Dismantling Process Silos
With the shift in demographics, insurers are scrambling to cater to their millennial customers. However, they are struggling to do so due to their dependency on numerous isolated applications for handling individual processes. A BPM based insurance platform helps insurance organisations through centralisation of various key insurance processes such as New Business Acquisition, Claims Processing, Underwriting, Policy Servicing etc. The platform integrates multiple point applications, which ensure seamless information flow across and dismantle data silos through integration with existing policy admin system and other peripheral applications.
Breaking the Build vs. Buy Paradigm
Empowering Insurers with Configurability
Traditionally, insurers have either leveraged homegrown applications in an attempt to build the core or used COTS. Building a core is an expensive and time-consuming process. And, although buying a COTS is faster, it comes with its limitations and rigidity. This is the foundation of the build vs. buy paradigm for insurers. However, BPM-based insurance technologies offer both the domain expertise and the ability to cater to unique organisational requirements with powerful business rules and rapid customisation capabilities.
Further, a BPM platform offers Insurance companies the ability to configure processes the way their organisation wants. This proves especially beneficial in the case of underwriting. The underwriting engine is the fulcrum of successful new business processing. It helps organisations to deliver a more informed and accurate risk evaluation. The underwriting engine today needs to be custom built to bring out the uniqueness of each insurance company, which is so dear to them. The Rules Engine brings this out perfectly.
Leveraging New Age Technologies
Integrating the Old and the New
Insurers can leverage a BPM platform as a base to fully utilise the potential of new age technologies. Let’s understand this with the example of New Business-
A front-end application has to be robust yet flexible enough to handle the multichannel initiation. With a BPM-based workflow, an application can be submitted through a host of methods as online portal, mobility, kiosk, customer walk-in, agent network, and now even though Social Media and Alexa. Further, this can be optimised via AI based lead source capturing via Alexa and Social Profiling. The application flows through data extraction points from forms and integrations to the Core Insurance Package. Here data is exchanged and duplicity checks are executed. Owing to the abundance of manual intervention, RPA integrated with BPM can play a critical role here. Further, BPM renders transactional applications more configurable to accommodate frequent changes in logic.
Delivering a Delightful Customer Experience
Building Brand Loyalty
With the increase in competition, it has become imperative for insurers to differentiate themselves through a delightful and unique customer experience. Not only does a positive customer experience reduce the cost of customer acquisition, a thorough customer experience strategy helps minimise attrition and foster loyalty. To this end, insurers often find a BPM platform immensely helpful in identifying the right solution for their customers, updating them on progress of their cases and supplying them with timely information through emails and notifications. Further, a BPM platform helps optimise customer touchpoints with its front end connectors and helps deliver a smooth transacting experience to customers.
Every insurance organisation is unique. In order to keep up with the dynamic market conditions, insurers need a platform that can cater to their unique requirements and align with their business goals. A BPM based insurance platform offers them the requisite ability to optimise internal operations and lead with a competitive advantage.
Views expressed in this article are of Ritesh Varma, Head – Business Solutions Practice, Newgen Software Technologies Limited.
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