Next-gen group health insurance: How brokers can deliver more value with AI

The corporate insurance market is experiencing tremendous growth, with the global revenue of insurance brokerage projected to reach a staggering $130.35 billion by 2027 (as per the Insurance Brokers Global Market Report 2023). This growth welcomes new and active players, but a key challenge persists and that is high operational costs stemming from manual processes.

Navigating the quotes chaos: Manual, time-consuming, and error-prone

Corporate insurance brokers play a vital role, connecting businesses seeking employee health coverage with insurers offering group plans. Let’s take for instance an SME broker managing renewals and new acquisitions for corporate group health insurance.

• The traditional process begins when a business seeking group health insurance contacts an insurance brokerage.
• The brokerage assigns the request to an in-house insurance expert who selects 3-4 insurers according to the customer’s needs and downloads their quotes.
• Each quote comes as a separate PDF, with varying formats and terminology. This translates to hours spent manually sifting through data – benefits, premiums, network details – across these documents to create a comparison sheet.
• The manual slog to gather and compare such a sheet itself may take up to 30-60 minutes for benefits and premiums plus an additional SME industry average of one hour for network evaluations.

Industry experts estimate suggest a staggering 2 hours of thorough work per case.

The paper chase of manual quote gathering not only consumes broker time but also increases the risk of errors, particularly in the complex world of SME healthcare plans. Fortunately, AI offers powerful solutions to these challenges and empower brokers to capture their share of such a thriving market.

By automating routine tasks and providing instant insights, AI significantly reduces the workload and stress on brokers, allowing them to focus on client relations and strategic decision-making.

Let’s look at how AI is revolutionizing the health insurance sector.

Hyper-automate health insurance broking with AI-driven efficiency

AI is transforming the insurance domain through automating repetitive tasks, key data extraction, and providing rich analytical insights. Brokers can invest more time on crucial decision-making and providing tailored services to clients, while achieving higher productivity and accuracy.

In the SME sector, here are AI-driven approaches that are revolutionizing health insurance broking:

• Automated Quote Generation
  Robotic Process Automation (RPA) bots can automatically navigate insurer websites, input required information, and retrieve quotes in PDF format after the desired criteria are met. This automation saves brokers countless hours they would otherwise spend on manual data entry and retrieval, allowing them to quickly access necessary quotes with minimal effort.
  
  Hyperautomation can take this one step ahead. Since different insurers have diverse systems for quotation generation, by understanding diverse insurer systems, it ensures accurate quotes are retrieved efficiently, regardless of the source. Hyperautomation enables smart decision-making and improved data-processing functions.
  
  

• Data Extraction and Normalization
  OCR technologies combined with AI can gather data from all quotations in varying formats. It can scan and extract data from PDF files, while AI models interpret and standardize this information for easy comparison. This data is then normalized using algorithms, converting different terminologies into a consistent language for easy comparison. By automating data extraction and normalization, brokers no longer need to manually sift through and standardize diverse quotes, drastically reducing their workload and minimizing errors.
  
  

• Intelligent Comparison and Recommendation
  AI excels at comparing new quotations against existing policies and each other based on numerous parameters like benefits, premium costs, network coverage and so on. This intelligent comparison tool allows brokers to quickly and accurately identify the best policies for their clients without spending hours on manual comparisons, enhancing their efficiency and effectiveness.
  
  
• Automation of Client Reporting
  The system automatically generates reports presenting a clear comparison of the options for clients. Automated client reporting eliminates the need for brokers to manually create detailed reports, saving them valuable time and ensuring consistent, high-quality communication with clients.
  
  
• Continuous Learning and Improvement
  AI continuously learns from past decisions, client feedback, and market trends. As AI continuously learns and improves, recommendations become increasingly accurate, and the intermediary steps in the operation become more convenient and efficient. As a result, brokers benefit can maintain a competitive edge and keep adapting to evolving market demands.
  
  While AI does the heavy lifting of data collection, analysis and reporting, brokers can focus on their core strengths – building client relationships and providing strategic guidance. These AI-driven improvements offer several other benefits to brokers.

The benefits: Faster, cheaper, and more accurate processes

1. Streamline Audits: Eliminate manual processes and human error with AI-powered automation, leading to faster and more efficient initial audits.
2. Reduce Costs & Errors: AI minimizes operational costs associated with manual audits and reduces the risk of mistakes, boosting your value proposition.
3. Enhance Client Value: By lowering costs and improving efficiency, AI allows you to invest more resources in personalized service and client satisfaction.
4. Improve Financial Standing: Stronger client relationships and operational efficiency lead to a healthier financial bottom line for your brokerage firm.
5. Focus on Strategic Initiatives: Free yourself from tedious tasks and dedicate more time to providing strategic advice and building strong customer relationships.

Expanding AI's Role: Beyond Policy Comparisons

In addition to automating policy comparisons, AI gives additional opportunity to manage policy members and claims, automate enrolment processes, streamline claim processing, and even predict claims trends. These applications will enhance operational efficiencies further, reduce costs, and enhance the user experience for businesses and their employees.

Real-world application: A success story in the making

As we continue to explore the revolutionary benefits of AI in insurance brokerage sector, our ongoing study with a well-known corporate insurance client demonstrates early accomplishments and future possibilities. Our AI-enabled solutions are focused on automated quote generation, data extraction and normalization, and intelligent comparison and recommendation.

Already yielding positive results, the client who spent up to two hours physically preparing comparison sheets for various health insurance policies now spend less than 10 minutes. With our AI-powered solution, they client is experiencing significant reduction in processing time.

Although still in testing phase, this project demonstrates how AI may drastically streamline complicated procedures and has the potential to redefine industry norms by boosting speed, accuracy, and client service in the insurance brokerage domain.

Conclusion

The insurance brokerage market is embracing AI solutions to tackle challenges like manual processes, high costs, and the ever-present need for accuracy and efficiency. By automating routine tasks and offering powerful analytics, AI empowers brokers to work smarter, not harder and focus on strategic decision-making and fostering stronger client relationships. As the market evolves, AI is poised to play a key role in meeting the needs of corporate clients and driving innovation in group health insurance.