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How Insurance Sector Can Use BPM For Digital Transformation

Insurance Sector

The Insurance industry is undergoing tremendous transformation across the globe with competition vying for attention and jostling for a footing in the market place. In a market place such as the Indian subcontinent, digital transformation initiatives often translate into billions of dollars. However, insurers seem to have changed their approach while driving digital transformation home, as they no longer consider BPM in the traditional way. While in the past BPM was expected to manage the backend or work as an integration layer, today, insurers are going beyond its traditional capabilities! Insurers today are tapping the potential of intelligent BPM by integrating it with RPA, Analytics, Rules Engines, ML and Digital Sensing!

BPM as an Application Platform

A BPM platform offers a systematic approach to creating business applications and allows for modifications as per business requirements. Let’s understand this with the example of a New Business Acquisition for a Life Insurance.

An application can be submitted through a host of methods as online portal, mobility, kiosk, customer walk-in, agent network, and now even through Social Media and Alexa. The Front-end application has to be robust yet flexible enough to handle the multichannel initiation. 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 to exchange data and do duplicity checks and negative scores. Since there are a lot of manual operations, RPA integrated with BPM can play a critical role here. With BPM, transactional applications are much more configurable to accommodate frequent changes in logics. Gone are the days when mainframe applications were used as the primary application layer.

Thus, BPM serves as a perfect orchestra, which if conceived and orchestrated can produce a perfect symphony- an exciting challenge for a CIO! Moreover, BPM combined with allied technologies such as Rule Engine and Analytics also enables the underwriting engine. 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. 

Intelligent BPM Extends Customer Delight

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 minimize attrition and foster loyalty. To this end, insurers often find a BPM platform immensely helpful in identifying the right solutions for their customers, updating them on progress of their cases and supplying them with timely information through mails and notifications. Further, a BPM platform helps optimize customer touchpoints with its front end connectors and helps deliver a smooth transacting experience to customers.

Insurance companies also wish to build their core rather than opting for a COTS product that only creates process silos. This, as per Gartner, can be easily done using a BPM and Database backbone. Looking at the modular nature of the insurance business and its different entities that need to work in  sync,  insurers are increasingly banking on intelligent BPM to serve as a backbone and bring about the much sought-after digital transformation with new age technologies.

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