By Tom Wilde – In recent years, the insurance industry has seen an influx of new market entrants seeking to disrupt and reinvent specific business segments by launching new products and services free of the expense and overhead of “traditional” players. These digital “InsureTechs” have the advantage of leaner, more agile processes and lower transactional costs. Big incumbents, despite all their scale and financial leverage, often have a tough time competing with them.

Ironically, advances in new digital technologies like Artificial Intelligence, specifically applied to process automation (what some call Intelligent Process Automation), are levelling the playing field when it comes to organizational agility and operating efficiency. And claims processing is one particular area where larger insurers can take real advantage of these opportunities to keep pace.

The Challenges of Automating Claims Processing

Insurers have invested a lot in automation in recent years with great results. But claims processing remains a fairly manual process because of the large amounts of unstructured and semi-structured content that are typically core to the process. For example: Most claims processes are full of raw material that can be leveraged to accelerate the cycle time of a claim in the form of the claim data itself. These might include adjuster notes, call center notes and more. The big challenge is that the majority of the information is – primarily text and images. Sometimes they are also tagged with codes and categorizations that define the type of communication. Unfortunately, these are rarely consistent. That makes them difficult to translate for extraction and automation. Read On: