Accelerating digitization of P&C claims is focus of Verisk event

By Doug Bailey

Extreme – and more frequent – catastrophic events along with rising inflation are whipsawing the insurance industry and will be top of mind issues when more than 600 insurance professionals meet this week in Salt Lake City for a two-day Verisk conference on accelerated digitization in property/casualty claims and building restoration.

Verisk’s event this week, called Elevate, will focus on cost trends in the industry, weather prediction models, administrative technology innovations, and automating the claims processes, among others.

Aaron Brunko, the incoming president of Verisk, a data analytics and risk assessment firm, admittedly says the current spate of natural disasters and economic unease has helped push the growth and need for firms like Verisk.

“It’s not something that we’re rooting for,” he said. “But it does help the business as we focus on new technologies to improve our customers’ position. If they’re not successful, we’re not going to be successful.”

Brunko says insurers and policy holders can do much to lessen the severity and impact of catastrophic events that often go overlooked.

“There are things we do from a science perspective as we work with companies and individuals to lessen their exposure and build resiliency to reduce catastrophic impacts,” he said. “The key is the events can’t be prevented, for the most part, so we work with different providers, even competitors sometimes, to ensure that things are moving forward as quickly as possible and as efficiently and accurately as possible within the industry. If you can’t prevent it, how do you mitigate it and make the process as frictionless as possible?”

Carrie Barr, president of Verisk Casualty Solutions, boils down the searing topics facing the industry to rising claims costs, inflation, and “the great resignation.”

“We know a half million people will exit this business in the next couple of years,” she said. “And the average age of new recruits is higher than any other industry. So, the folks I talk to aren’t just worried about the great resignation, but they’re also really concerned about attraction and retention.”

Workflow automation and decision support, she says, can help bridge the gap from the executive level.

“Companies need to figure out some way to make better use of the talent they have and do things more efficiently and save some dollars on the bottom line,” she said. “That what workflow automation speaks to. When you do actually attract talent, you need to get your processes to a place that they don’t feel they’re in 1965 and everyone wants to jump ship and go to Google or somewhere fresh and new.”

Barr agrees that the insurance industry overall has been slow to automate and adapt technology solutions. But that may be changing as more companies realize the bottom-line value of machine learning and embedded AI systems.

“We adopt those systems these days in a way that empowers and augments the human in a way that takes us to the future,” she said.

An example she said was the process of reviewing and evaluating medicinal records, which have become enormous and complex.

“We can automate that process and cut the time needed by 90%,” she said, referring to Verisk’s Discovery Navigator platform. “Something that took hours to do can be done in seconds, pulling out all the information needed without a human having to do all the work to find it.”

“There’s change in the air,” she said. “Companies know that they need to act differently, and they're excited to embrace that change.”

Barr said one of the benefits of the COVID-19 pandemic was that companies could change processes and personnel resources and change them quickly.

“We needed a way to figure out how to augment the human and casualty claims processes,” she said. “And we did.”

Doug Bailey is a journalist and freelance writer who lives outside of Boston. He can be reached at [email protected].