West says the aim of technology is not to replace the adviser in the insurance process.“I would say it’s quite the opposite,” he says.
“What all this is doing is enabling the risk advisers to focus on the areas where they really add value, rather than shuffling paper,” he says.
“It’s about letting the planners do what planners are really good at, which is making judgments and using the expertise of our underwriters to make good decisions on complex issues.”
West says that while great strides have been made at the start of the process, the claims end of the process “is still a work in progress”.
“But we’re making significant in- roads,” he says.
“In terms of our work flows, it starts behinds the scenes [where] we have introduced new work flow technology.”
He says the aim is to “get the right claims to the right person” quickly, and first time.
“It’s about streaming the difficult, complex claims to people who have the experience,” he says.
“And straightforward claims are turned around much faster.
“At this stage, there is no straight- through processing on claims, and I think that’s a few years away yet. But the technology we are using [now] will enable us to be far more productive in claims.” West says the latest technology in-
novations are just the latest evolution in the life insurance industry.
“This isn’t the end,” he says.
“This is just a stage in the journey. What the next five years look like, I think it is moving more and more to self-service for clients and advisers – and not just on new products, but on legacy products as well.
“And also, I think appropriate technology applied to the claims area will be the next stage of development, from a service point of view.
“And I think that what technology enables us to do is, increasingly, what is called ‘mass automation’ – not my term – to increasingly segment our customer base and apply sophisticated solutions to the actual needs of our customers.”
Improving adviser productivity also is at the forefront of BT’s mind, says Scott Moffitt, the company’s national life insurance manager.
“It’s around faster processing of business and providing efficiencies to advisers in their businesses,” Moffitt says.
“It’s expensive to build. It’s difficult to put a number on any one piece of the technology puzzle, so the quick answer is no [I cannot say how much it costs], but it’s a significant spend for the business.
“But you do see the benefits, in improved efficiencies and enabling [business] growth without necessarily incur ring growth in head count.”
Moffitt says straight-through processing leads to improved efficiencies for a number of reasons, including improved accuracy and completeness.
“The quality of the information that is submitted has significantly shortened turnaround time,” he says.
“A large part of that is just that every question is filled in.”
Moffitt says a certain level of technical competency and efficiency is, today, necessary just to get a ticket to the game.
“I do not think there is anyone who doesn’t have an electronic underwriting solution,” he says.
“It’s then about who is delivering the most efficient solution to enable advisers to service their clients.”
Moffitt says BT adopted a “client- centric design process” in developing the latest iteration of its electronic solution. In this case, “client” meant “both the adviser, and their customers”, he says.
“We sat with around 25 advisers around the country and sat with them in their businesses and went through how they engage with their customers and how they completed business, then looked at their work processes, and how what we delivered to them interacted with their work processes,” Moffitt says.
Life companies are also examining how they can interact more efficiently with parties other than clients and advisers. For example, Macquarie Life’s recent focus has been on making the task of obtaining medical reports faster and simpler.
Macquarie has been working with UHG, a company that provides medical evidence systems, to set up a mechanism to allow a request for a medical assessment to be “commenced within minutes of an application or underwriter’s assessment being completed”.
In a statement, Macquarie Life said that it is using “a direct, automated version of UHG’s Unifier platform [enabling] medical assessment information to be sent electronically between Macquarie Life and UHG, helping to drive efficiencies for advisers by reducing the time it takes to assess new business”.
Justin Delaney, head of insurance and platforms for Macquarie Adviser Services, said in the statement that the new process removes “what can often be a time-consuming administrative process, and streamlining the medical assessments process for advisers, allowing them to focus on where they can add most value, which is advising their clients”.
AIA’s Tez says freeing up advisers to spend as much time as possible face-to- face with clients is an obvious benefit of better technology solutions in life insurance. A challenge for insurance companies, though, is a lack of consistency and, frankly, expertise, among advisers.
“There is a wide range of [ways of ] doing things, and we do have different processes for different advisers,” Tez says.
“Some advisers don’t like to use technology, or they deal in very, very large sums insured which cannot be automated, or very complex or unhealthy lives or impaired lives. Those types of advisers need a more hands-on approach and more relationship-intensive-type experience.
“There are some advisers who are only just starting to write risk who do not necessarily understand the complexities of underwriting or anything like that, and they are the types of people who, potentially, just want to collect the clients’ details and pass over all of that information to the life company, to then make a call to their customer to complete the whole application.”