• By Andy Flower
• Published 01/4/2013

Is your insurance application process affecting your profits in an adverse manner? The dependence on manual, paper-based underwriting may lead to a number of problems. This, in turn, may affect your profits. In such a circumstance, the decision to automate the application processing may prove to be advantageous for an insurance company.

How does automated underwriting improve your existing business processes? The features of the automated underwriting software may help overcome the problems you face due to your dependence on manual application processing. Here are the three most common problems of manual underwriting that you may avoid with automated underwriting.

Problem 1: Manual underwriting often involves lengthy processes. In such a setup, the insurance application goes to the underwriters for risk assessment. If necessary, the underwriter may request for more information; this may take more time.

If the application contains complications, the underwriter may forward it to the senior underwriters, which also lengthens the processing time. In such a situation, the processing time may be a few days, or even a few weeks.

Solution: If an insurance company automates the entire process, the issuance of a policy may be completed on the same day on which the applicant submits the application. The system completes the data collection and risk assessment and makes a decision.

If an insurance company partially automates the process, it may take a day or two to process the application. In such a setup, the data collection is completed by trained staff while the risk assessment and policy issuance is completed by the system.

: Manual underwriting involves more costs. The necessity to employ professional underwriters to complete the repetitive tasks involves high costs and leads to a waste of valuable resources.

Competitive pricing alone does not lead to profits for an insurance company. It is necessary to combine this with a reduction in application processing costs to ensure profits for your company.

Solution: When you opt for automated underwriting for your insurance company, you save money on the employment of professional underwriters for the repetitive tasks. Even if you opt for partial automation, the data collection may be completed by the call centre staff.

With the decrease in labour costs and the reduction in processing time, you may be able to create a larger client base. You may also assign the professional underwriters to more important tasks such as creation of product design ideas.

Problem 3: Manual underwriting often contains errors and inconsistencies. As the process requires manual re-keying of the applicant data at every step, the chances of errors increase.

Moreover, the decisions arrived at in the manual underwriting process depend on the knowledge and expertise of the individual underwriters. This may lead to inconsistencies in the decisions arrived at by different professionals.

Solution: With automated risk assessment, it is possible to avoid errors. There is no need to key in the data at every step, as automated underwriting requires no, or minimal, human intervention.

When you automate the underwriting process, the decisions are arrived at on the basis of the rules set by the rules engine. There is no opportunity for inconsistency when the decisions are based on the same set of rules.

Author Bio

Andy Flower is a professional underwriter. He provides a brief overview of the ways in which automated risk analysis and underwriting can solve the problems of manual processes. If you are looking for more information on Tele-underwriting or on complete automation of underwriting, he suggests you to visit http://automation.munichre.com/ for further details.

Hello, myself Andy Flower. I am an Author and doing the same for a long time. To know more about me…..please visit my website!!!!