How RPA can help the Travel Insurance industry grow

It has been close to a year since the WHO declared Covid-19 as the global pandemic. Like most of the businesses, the travel industry was one among the worst hit. However, it did not thwart the growth of the travel insurance sector. 

A recent report published by ‘Valuates Reports’ says – “The global travel insurance market size was valued at USD 19.2 billion in 2019 and is projected to reach USD 39.3 billion by 2027, growing at a CAGR of 17.4% from 2020 to 2027.” 

The world’s best travel insurance companies such as Travelex Insurance Services, Allianz Travel Insurance, Seven Corners Inc, IMG, World Nomads, AIG Travel Guard, Generali Global Assistance have one thing in common – an effective Travel  Insurance Management System in place.  

To stay at the top of the competitive market, it is imperative to have a robust travel insurance management system, empowered by disruptive technologies, which would cater to ever changing demands and needs of the customers.  To attain this, there is a need for a comprehensive Test Automation framework that can standardize every feature of the product line and ease the process. 

Per a study by Mckinsey, “The insurance industry has the potential to automate 25% of the process by 2025, and most of its automation potential comes from operational processes where Robotic Process Automation (RPA) can help.” 

While the travel insurance is to safeguard against the unexpected, the RPA has the potential to play a key role after a certain degree of standardization is attained. The degree of standardization can be categorized as the –  

• Processes that are repetitive and predictable 
• Processes that are stable over time 
• Processes that have lower level of customization 
•  Processes that adopt common industry technical standards and specifications 

The impact of RPA will improve customer and intermediary satisfaction, quality, and turnaround time; build core competencies.  Irrespective of where the RPA is utilized, this disruptive technology will help organizations reduce their time spent on repetitive tasks. 

As per the estimates put forth by UiPath – “The current RPA technology can save insurers: 

• around 18% of manual intervention  
• 35% of data processing time and  
• 23% of stakeholder interaction time. 

Contrary to popular belief, travel insurance is not a substitute for health insurance, but something more than that. While there is a medical component for accidental injuries and sudden illness, it will also cover several accidental incidents such as Trip cancellation/interruption, emergency evacuation, lost/damaged/stolen possessions, expatriation in case of natural disasters. In essence, the travel insurance is for all-round emergencies and not just the medical ones. 

In order to harness the 360 degree capabilities of the travel insurance ecosystem, there is a dire need for insurance companies to leverage RPA bots to automate most of the claim processing steps such as extracting information, verifying and identifying fraudulent claims,  integration of claim related sources, and inputting data into the systems. 

When RPA is amalgamated with Artificial Intelligence (AI) and data analytics, the bots can collect data from internal and external sites and fill the data into their internal systems. It can then assess loss runs and analyze the history of customer’s claims and provide pricing options based on the previous results. 

According to Workfusion, “automated claims processing can reduce manual workload by 80% and the time necessary for the process by 50%.” 

The growth of the RPA market has been at a breakneck speed and is now a USD 5 billion industry. The adoption of intelligent process test automation in the insurance industry is believed to be the solution for many challenges such as – 

• Fast to react to unexpected changes in the market and the customer behavior 
• Improve customer experience and at the same time reduce expenses 
• Tremendous pressure to speed up cycle times 
• Heavy reliance on manual work 
• Overflow of routine back-office operations 

When compared to RPA, the benefits will be tangible when intelligent process test automation is used alongside Artificial Intelligence (AI) in insurance operations. This can help eliminate the manual burden of unstructured data processing. The AI combined with RPA can significantly automate end-to-end insurance processes in the aspects of data processing. 

When things go wrong on your journey, the travel insurance provides compensation, support and medical care. They still rely heavily on legacy systems to manage their business operations. As there is a significant investment of money and time in installing new software such as ERP systems or BPM, they are forced to stick to their legacy systems.  

Automating all the operations in these legacy systems is a cakewalk for RPA in the travel insurance sector. With very minimal or no changes to the current legacy systems, the RPA bots can use the existing user interfaces and can imitate human clicks and keystrokes.  However, the results are not tangible when only RPA is used. 

The cognitive part of the work will be automated when intelligent insurance test automation solutions are combined with RPA and powerful AI capabilities. While 30% of the automated process requires exception handling, these solutions can empower the exception handling capabilities through a human-in-the-loop approach. 

The successful implementation of an intelligent test automation program can reap benefits to any organization leveraging travel insurance solutions. A 100% ROI can be expected within the first year of implementation and they can potentially allow enterprises to –  

• Achieve 100% regulatory compliance 
• Achieve 90% accuracy  
•  Increase overall profitability up by 50% 
•  Considerably reduce the cost of automated job functions 
• Increase the efficiency 
• Drastically reduce manual intervention 

There are several automation challenges as most processes in insurance are unstructured, high in volume and are too complicated for a traditional RPA to handle. While adding more bots over time can build a scalable automation program, it is practically not viable. Introducing intelligence bots is the solution to these practical challenges in Test Automation. They not only help in scaling the number of deployed bots but also add value to the work they perform. 

While the potential for Test Automation in the travel insurance sector is limitless, one should have an understanding of where and how to start the automation program. They should also have a deep knowledge on the areas that are most viable for end-to-end test automation process in travel insurance. 

At Cigniti, we can help –  

• Find the right use case for your test automation needs in travel insurance  
• Train the bots on your data without the need for data scientists or ML engineers 
• Deploy and see the real value of your bots working in production and bringing real value in weeks, not months. 
• Automate research and analysis of all the documents pertaining to travel insurance for benefit offerings 
• Provide expedited services to all the customers with Intelligent Test Automation coupled with AI and Internet of Things (IoT) 
• Streamline travel insurance documents processing and allow the resources to focus on high priority tasks  
• Improve customer satisfaction with automated claim intakes, registration, processing, and settlement 
• Increase the accuracy and speed of policy management operations pertaining to Travel Insurance Management System 
• Leverage Cigniti’s Intelligent Test Automation to handle discrepancies in invoice handling 
• Gain visibility into your accounts payable/supply chain processes 

Need help? 

Talk to our RPA experts. They will help you provide a solution for your business and will demonstrate how to scale the Test automation further to create a robust Travel Insurance Management System.