Digital solutions are taking over the insurance industry. The ones with longevity will be those that enable insurers to better assess risks, lower operation costs, enhance claim management and improve customer service, while achieving digitalization.
Five years from now, nearly all insurance executives imagine a digitally transformed insurance industry. Trends include Artificial Intelligence, Big Data, Blockchain, Cloud services, and Mobile technology.
There are plenty of examples of these technologies, already in action. Companies are onboarding data analytics platforms to make smarter decisions, adding chatbots to their websites to improve customer interactions, trialling IoT devices at home or in-vehicle, securing transactions using blockchain, and making it possible for onboarding and claims to be handled in minutes.
But how can organizations leverage the drive to digitization, and turn it into true business value and growth? How can you move from simply adding digital capabilities, to becoming fully digitalized?
One Integrated, Digital Experience
For many future-focused insurance companies, it’s about creating a whole digital experience from end to end, an omni-channel customer experience through an interconnected set of services that allow users to fulfil a variety of needs.
Beyond the many benefits that digitalization brings to insurance companies themselves, driving this is also customer expectations. Today’s customers won’t wait on hold to speak to their insurers, they want to be able to buy insurance in one-click - from their smartphone, laptop or tablet. They won’t sit by the mailbox while a check takes 28 days to arrive, they want to be able to make a claim and see the pay-out, in real-time. They want their whole insurance experience to include multiple digital technologies, so that the whole process of getting insured, renewing a policy, making a claim, receiving a pay out, can take minutes, and be completed from the palm of their hands.
We’re seeing this in action with innovative, fast-growing insurance companies such as Lemonade, who offer customers the ability to get insured in 19 seconds via chat-bot and video, or who promise payment in under 3 minutes. Another example is AXA’s Climate division, that offers parametric insurance options that make the touchless claim a reality.
The next big change will be within the solutions themselves. Insurance companies need to choose from the growing variety of software tools, cherry-picking the technologies that will allow them to add the most value. This could be anything from reducing operational costs, improving customer experience and sales productivity, and adding efficiency and control across the whole customer lifecycle. The winning choices will check all of these boxes, and more.
How Can Remote Health Monitoring Help Insurance Companies Enhance Digitalization?
We built Binah.ai with this mindset front and center, pushing forward to help insurance companies add value. Here’s how it works. Our technology allows you to extract vital signs from a user, remotely, using a smartphone, laptop or tablet. It runs in real time, and can extract heart rate, oxygen saturation, respiration rate, heart rate variability, and mental stress levels under 1 minute, with medical-grade accuracy. On the way, are new vital signs that include hemoglobin levels, blood pressure, alcohol blood level, temperature and more.
Behind the “magic”, the technology is cutting-edge. We apply advanced signal processing and AI to normalize the light levels and to detect the user’s face and combine this with rPPG (remote photoplethysmography) to analyze a video from the user’s upper cheek region. In situations where light is very poor, or extreme motion is unavoidable, PPG can be used via a single fingertip on the back camera of the device. Even if you’re wearing a mask, a hat, or sunglasses, 99% of the time we can find the skin region we need to get accurate vital sign measurements!
Our solution is built to enable insurers and reinsurers to further increase their digitalization capabilities. In fact, the ability to access these vital signs from a management portal empowers stakeholders across the insurance value chain with the insights that they need to make a limitless amount of data-driven decisions.
Here are just a few examples:
Onboarding/Underwriting/: Insurance companies can speed up time-to-value in taking on new clients, eliminate lengthy and costly medical checks, increase outreach to extreme locations and make it easy to get real-time insight into new customer health and wellbeing. They can enrich online health checklists by collecting important vital signs indicative of someone’s general health status, analysing the results and then tracking trends over time to help with accurate policy renewals. Binah.ai’s solution is software-based and supported by a device your clients already have: a smartphone, tablet or laptop. No need for extra wearables or medical equipment.
Dynamic Underwriting: Adding periodic insights into customer’s vital signs and mental stress levels, supports insurers in limiting risk and making smarter, more data-driven decisions about clients, without adding operational costs.
Claims: Insurers can add medical data to a customer claim, providing evidence to augment reporting, and reducing the likelihood of fraud and indemnity costs. They can make it simpler for customers to make a claim, and get the support they need, fast.
Wellness Programmes: By empowering users with a vital signs monitoring tool, they can stay on top of their health and wellbeing, and insurers can predict claims and costs ahead of time, providing insight and pre-emptive support on both sides of the relationship. Companies such as Vitality offer rewards for lifestyle choices both physical and emotional, and Aetna Wellness includes programs for anything from pregnancy and mindfulness, to support quitting smoking. These are helping people to live a better life, hand in hand with essential insurance coverage - to name only a few benefits.
Telehealth Services: Brought to the attention of the masses via COVID-19, but applicable across the board, now and tomorrow. Medical staff are overwhelmed and people want ways to access remote tools rather than risk leaving the house when they are sheltering from harm. An online medical assessment can keep users happy and safe, while reducing operational costs and improving risk management.
Creating Truly Valuable Customer Experiences
Traditionally, in order to accurately measure critical risk indicators, policy holders may have needed regular medical check-ups. From one single device, already owned by the user, customers now have access to essential data that can help give insight into cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, mental health, pregnancy, physical wellness, and more, all with medical- grade accuracy.
Binah.ai is available via SDK or as a white-labelled platform, offering you the ability to present a digital-first face to your customers under your own brand, today, not at some unspecified time in the future.
Our strategic partners, SOMPO HImawari LIfe, are a great example. As Japan’s second-largest insurance company - they use our SDK in their Linkx application, measuring the mental stress levels and the heart rate of their insured, and using this data to help them to lead a better, healthier life.
Being part of the future of insurance means stepping away from adding single digital capabilities, and focusing on being truly digital-first from the inside-out. Which one describes you?
ARTICLE WRITTEN BY: DAVID MAMAN
David Maman is the Co-Founder, CEO and CTO at Binah.ai.
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