Until recently, the insurance industry has been a manual landscape, navigated by brokers or agents alone. But as new technology emerges, fresh tools and software are becoming more available and ‘InsurTech’ becomes the new it-word, as more and more claims professionals are digitising their processes.

What is InsurTech?

According to Investopedia, InsurTech refers to the use of technology innovations, designed to squeeze out savings and efficiency from the current insurance industry model.

It’s quite literally a combination of the words “insurance” and “technology,” and encompasses the software, algorithms and applications for digital-based tools. InsurTech platforms typically have an artificial intelligence (AI) engine, allowing users to both automate day-to-day tasks and streamline complex processes by minimising the risk of any human error. In fact, most InsurTech businesses are often adopted for some or all the following key reasons:

1. To provide a digital approach to customer service, allowing clients to interact with their insurer using websites, mobile apps and other digital platforms for anything from purchasing a policy to filing a claim.
2. To offer personalised services, allowing insurers to identify unique coverage needs and tailor customer service to each policyholder.
3. To allow customers to purchase insurance directly through a website or mobile app for without the need to physically speak to someone.
4. For underwriting support and risk analysis, using data analytics to help insurers more accurately predict the likelihood of claim filings, estimate future losses and determine premiums.
5. To more accurately assess damage following an accident. 

What are the benefits of InsurTech?

InsurTech can help address customer demand by improving overall customer experience (CX), create efficiencies and reduce costs in the insurance industry.

For example, InsurTech can make insurance more accessible to the masses by simplifying the buying experience. That’s because in the modern, digital world, it’s often a matter of convenience that guides a customers’ decision-making process when choosing an insurer or product. In other words, people want to be able to get coverage quickly and easily.

InsurTech can also allow insurers to better serve their customers by being more efficient in the way they do business, offering more transparency and a much better ease of access for policyholders, such as hosting a 24/7 customer service AI chatbot on their website or offering progress notifications each time there’s an update.

Where a recent article from InsurTech Digital highlights that more than 70% of small business owners work 40+ hours per week as they need to fill a variety of different roles, this automation can lead to significant increases in productivity, as many businesses otherwise simply wouldn’t have the time.

This is ultimately, the primary benefit of InsurTech – to speed up claim processing times, helping to ease the process for all parties involved by automating complicated, time-consuming tasks.

Can experience in the market can really help InsurTech businesses?

With increasingly demanding consumers, struggling legacy systems and never-ending data, InsurTech businesses offer the insurance market an opportunity to completely transform the way they do business.

According to the PwC report “The untapped potential within the UK Insurance market”, InsurTechs tend to view themselves as the catalyst for change within the insurance industry. They believe that through partnerships they can aid incumbent firms on their journey to innovate, but generally, InsurTechs do not have ‘the answer’ to an incumbent’s problems – they have the tools and capabilities that can be utilised to find the answer.

However, whilst the insurance industry is aware of its need to change, they are often limited by the size and scale of their operations. PwC highlight that 75% of insurers are proactively taking steps to move legacy technology landscapes to more dynamic and flexible software-as-a-service (Saas) models, though the overall process of replacing ‘old legacy’ with ‘new legacy’ can be a daunting thought.

For InsurTechs, they’re ideally placed to support this change, there to develop solutions that are scalable and can be implemented, integrated and supported. And of course, collaboration is key when it comes to an InsurTech business working with an insurer; having an open approach to cooperation in the insurance industry will help build an environment of innovation, as well as bring an industry that has often been playing catch up to one that’s on the cutting edge of change.

How we can help?

At ECSG, we’re specialists in technical claims handling, and our best-in-class claims supply chain allows us to bring fresh and innovative solutions to the claims and InsurTech market.

MGA’s, Insurers and brokers alike choose us to support them with service fulfilment and supply chain execution, trusting that we will improve their claims spend and customer experience with the help of our technology and expertise.

Why? Because we don’t operate any legacy systems. Instead, we use a cutting-edge enterprise-grade infrastructure which is available on any web-enabled device; helping us to engage with the customer, effectively and quickly.

That’s because to us, our core values of trust, transparency, and the application of technology – fused with the knowledge and experience of our people – are key to delivering the best results aligned with customers’ expectations.

To find out more about our bespoke services, reach out today.