Emerging technologies benefit claims processing

Claims management can benefit from new artificial intelligence technologies emerging in the insurance industry.

This was the main message from Tom Helm, director and claims practice leader at Willis Towers Watson, speaking at the Intelligent Automation event in London today (Tuesday, May 21).

Helm said the world of claims has changed in the past decade, thanks to technology. Ten years ago many companies were still struggling with legacy mainframes from their past, or ones that they had inherited through M&A activity, he said. These old mainframes led to inconsistent data and were often based around out of date information.

However, in recent years an increasing series of platform upgrades have led to AI systems becoming much more common. As a result, companies are now able to balance good service with strong cost controls, he said.

Helm's presentation, called ‘Deliver Next Generation Claims Processing', sponsored by Willis Towers Watson, emphasised the complicated decision making and judgement that can be required in claims. Certain individual claims can be more complicated than others, resulting in a greater level of ambiguity embedded into them. But unstructured data can be the key to solving this, for example, digging into this data can uncover the details required to settle or analyse them.

Employers liability claims can be analysed for patterns to control costs. The right person in the right place is important, he said.

Data science can also be useful. With topic modelling further insight can be extracted from unstructured data. Helm said that there are a lot of opportunities in this area, supported by analytics.

He also noted that Willis Towers Watson has access to softwares and technologies, and that claims AI & automation technology allows trends to be identified in real time.

Finally, he concluded by saying that AI can allow for a more engaged study of the fraud ecosystem, as technology can analyse what might be wrong or suspicious with a claim.