While the world around us is changing so rapidly, adapting to this change is no longer an option but a necessity to survive. The Indian Insurance Industry, too, as a whole, has proven its resilience in the current dynamic context but nevertheless continues to face various challenges to be dealt with as it navigates through this evolving landscape. As innovators, we at Aureus Analytics felt the urge to aid these giant strides with a little insight from the who's who of the industry. Thus, came about the metamorphosis of 'Aureus Insights' from a weekly blog to a periodically published yearbook in India that encapsulates this changing trend in the inaugural edition, the AI landscape, and a bird's eye view of what we can expect on the road ahead.

The insurance industry in India is expected to reach US $280 billion by 2020-2021. The life insurance industry is expected to increase by 14-15% annually during the next three to five years. With such rapid growth in the life insurance market, the number of fraud casess is also expected to increase. Recent reports suggest that fraud consume more than 8.5% of the revenue that the industry generates.

One of the challenges faced by data scientists is dealing with unstructured data using traditional machine learning models. These models are trained on structured data that have input features with corresponding output labels. When using unstructured data, the data cannot be directly used as an input feature. One approach is to use Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) to unlock business insights from unstructured data.

Digital is the key player in this time of the Covid-19 pandemic. Insurance companies are embracing digital channels now more than ever to reach out and connect with current and prospective customers. Covid-19 has changed the public’s outlook on insurance. Its value is perceived to be more critical as folks are considering the consequences of not being covered. Because of this, it’s essential now more than ever to provide consumers the ability to research products online without the assistance of agents, and at the convenience of their own home. Insurance companies must provide the tools and means to analyze various insurance products, provide price transparency, and a clean digital environment that is easy to navigate and execute.

Currently, many insurance carriers can only analyze agent productivity based on the premiums written and the loss ratio of their network of independent agencies. Looking only at past results doesn’t necessarily provide an accurate view of how an insurance carrier can increase agent productivity going forward. By using AI for increasing agency productivity, insurers can now predict the best course of action as opposed to waiting to review past results.

Sentiment reveals a lot about what customers think about an insurance brand, including how well customer representatives are resolving issues and how happy customers are with the underwriting process. This is where the sentiment analysis of structured and unstructured data can help insurers understand how their customers are feeling.

In order for regional insurance carriers to continue to grow, the acquisition of new customers and retaining existing customers is imperative. Because of this, identifying cross-sell and upsell opportunities has never been more critical. One of the significant challenges carriers face when growing their company is analyzing and managing the capabilities of their agent distribution channel.

I recently attended my first InsurTech Connect conference in Las Vegas a few weeks ago. Aureus has been attending and exhibiting at this conference, so I thought I knew what to expect. What surprised me the most about ITC 2019 was the sheer volume of people and the efficiency with which it was handled. I was impressed with how well organized it was. ITC's mobile app was a great way to encourage networking. The app enabled me to speak with over 150 attendees from insurance companies, agencies, brokers, and other technology providers. From these conversations, there were three topics that seemed to be on everyone’s mind this year.

The use of social media is growing at a steady rate, and with that, the adoption of predictive analytics is on the rise as well.

RPA is Changing Lives The digital marketplace is extremely challenging. Businesses must stay ahead of the game by being innovative and creative to continually provide automated processes that will improve the customer experience. Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and Digital Process Automation (DPA) are the front runners by being one of the fastest growing segments of business technology these days. Globally, the RPA market size was valued at USD 597.5 million in 2018 and is expected to register a compound annual growth rate of 31.1% between 2019 - 2025.

With the artificial intelligence (AI) technology that exists today, an AI-enabled single view of the customer provides insurers with an opportunity to improve the customer experience. In the previous blog article “The Importance of Having a Single View of Your Customer in 2019,” we discussed a few of ways this can be accomplished.