Our thoughts

In our first article we looked at some of the basic terminology used around the umbrella term artificial intelligence (AI). In our second we take a deeper dive into an area which we think has huge potential in underwriting and claims. This is the world of optical character recognition (OCR), natural language processing (NLP) and text mining. As we have said previously, the amount of data and indeed data sources available to underwriters is expanding rapidly. To make sense of this information, underwriters and claims technicians need appropriate techniques to use the data: sifting through what there is, establishing what…

Automating the underwriting process holds great potential, but to realise that potential you need the right product or products. There are plenty of software suppliers and plenty of decision engines out there but there is a big range of capabilities too. Some have theoretical capability. We worked with an insurer looking to overhaul its back office and introduce on-line submission of applications with automated underwriting. Its admin software supplier said it had a decision engine too and so the insurer decided to adopt it – only the engine turned out to be a basic ‘shell’ with limited capability and nothing…