The Next Generation of Insurance

This new era promises a more efficient, responsive, and customer-centric insurance ecosystem, attuned to the needs of today’s digital-savvy consumers and insurance professionals. Together, we'll unlock new possibilities, drive innovation, and create lasting value for brokerages and clients alike in this exciting new chapter of insurance technology. What does that look like? While we can’t predict the future, we have some expert-informed insights into what the Next Generation of Insurance will entail.

According to McKinsey, artificial intelligence is set to transform the distribution, underwriting, claims, and service sectors by integrating AI into core processes. This shift towards an “AI-enabled” model will create a "human in the loop" system, enhancing productivity and enabling more high-quality customer interactions.

When AI capabilities live natively within the insurance ecosystem, brokerages can confidently use them, knowing their data remains within the security infrastructure of existing systems and processes. AI systems should be designed and developed with ethical considerations in mind, be transparent in their decision-making processes, be accountable for their actions, and comply with laws and regulations.

Pushing Brokerages Forward

Embracing next-gen tech in the following areas will push brokerages forward in the Next Generation of Insurance by delivering meaningful value to brokerages at every stage of the Digital Roundtrip:

Sales & Marketing

Brokerage staff are insurance professionals and trusted advisors who often do not have the time to think about and craft perfect email communication in hopes that their contacts will read and engage with their calls to action. Not all organizations have a marketing representative or team to write compelling, on-brand emails for them. Tools like ChatGPT can be used to help generate email content, but work outside of the email-building workflow and ultimately lack the insurance domain expertise necessary to ensure not only that the messaging is compelling, but also that the language, terminology, and value-added content are optimized for insurance brokers and their customers.

Accessible natively within the broker management system, an integrated, generative AI tool purpose-built for insurance brokers can assist in creating clear, concise, and engaging communications. Brokers can then easily place prospects and clients into a drip marketing campaign, send a one-off piece of content to help nurture the relationship, decide the content’s length, formality, and subject matter, and let the power of generative AI technology provide descriptive text to catch the recipient’s attention. Brokers remain in the driver’s seat, giving final approval prior to sending an email that is sure to pique the recipient’s interest. 
With insurance-specific AI-powered content creation natively embedded in email and campaign-building workflows, marketers and other brokerage teams can free up hours and create more engaging content that wins and retains customers.

Submissions & Underwriting

The manual, time-consuming email exchange of forms and information between a brokerage and insurer during the rating and underwriting process prevents them from working together effectively. The breadth and variety of standardized forms required for submissions live in multiple systems and are delivered inconsistently. Insurer feedback indicates that fully one in three commercial submissions are never even reviewed by an underwriter due to this complexity and resulting backlog, making it challenging for insurers to underwrite desired business and brokerage partners from optimally placing it.

The power of AI can be leveraged throughout the broker and insurer submission interaction to drive efficiency and better relationships. Insurance-specific AI can identify coverages for an insured, make recommendations on where a brokerage should place the risk based on known markets for similar risks, and easily pre-fill the forms with risk data directly from the management system. An AI-powered document-understanding engine can take these forms and turn them into digitally structured information, enriching the risk profile with online insights and underwriter/producer email communications. AI-augmented submissions seamlessly route to underwriters for consolidated review and faster processing. This connectivity creates the opportunity for a unique collaboration experience between the underwriter and the broker in a single pane of glass, where questions and communication on missing information, submission status and more happen seamlessly.

Policy Management

Renewals are one of the most critical stages in the policy lifecycle and vital to maintaining a healthy, growing book of business. Renewals are also an opportunity to assess the risk of the current policy and identify additional client needs, pointing out which additional coverage could be valuable to your client while also increasing your revenue growth. However, easily identifying the right account rounding opportunities within a book of business requires a lot of research into clients’ risks – asking insureds for information, visiting third-party resources or bookmarked databases, followed by entering and submitting information to insurers. Yet, when we asked brokers to rank top sources for growth over the next five years in our 2024 Voice of Customer survey, account rounding was cited as the #1 under-leveraged growth opportunity. Account rounding recommendations were ranked as the top insights brokers wanted to see embedded into management system workflows. There are massive premium upsell opportunities within brokers existing books that insurance-specific AI solutions can help unlock.

Integrated and accessible natively in the brokerage management system, an AI-powered growth engine helps identify high-probability cross-sell and upsell opportunities when renewing a policy. The technology leverages AI to highlight coverage gaps based on account attributes, industry code, and existing coverage in the current customer policy. Best-fit markets are suggested for each risk by examining where a brokerage has had the most success in the past and provides seamless bridging to quoting and submission workflows. All of this is only possible with the rich insurance data in the system and the industry knowledge that understands the complexity of policies and market nuances.

Leveraging AI-powered account rounding helps brokerages increase the premium value of every account and generate a more profitable book of business. Better assessing a customer’s exposures and ensuring they get the right coverage also results in fewer uninsured claims and a reduction in E&O exposures.

Financial Management

Reconciling transactions with insurer statements to ultimately balance the books, pay producers, and make money for the brokerage works well for downloaded direct bill lines of business. However, many direct bill, or broker-billed policies and insurer statements do not download and are often delivered in unstructured PDFs or even paper forms with hundreds, even thousands of records to process manually.

Reconciling direct bill commissions and broker-billed vendor payables were reported as the top two most common day-to-day tasks for finance/accounting users in our most recent Voice of Customer survey. As we dug in with users on these workflows, we heard that this manual gathering of statements and data recording can take 15+ hours per week for accounting staff. Some organizations have entire teams dedicated to this work and/or are outsourcing at a significant cost.

There is a much better way to do this critical but cumbersome reconciliation work. A natively embedded solution within the management system accounting General Ledger creates a single workflow that eliminates the physical and digital “swivel chair” between disparate systems and printed statements while delivering automated statement reconciliation for direct bill commissions and brokerage bill insurer payables. In both scenarios, imagine simply uploading statements in any form, a scanned image PDF, CSV, etc., and let AI work its magic – extracting information like dates, premiums, policy or plan numbers, and commissions, transforming these into structured financial data that can be reviewed and validated before importing and automatically reconciling to premium payables.

AI-powered accounting automation helps finance and accounting teams move money faster for your business while reducing your back-office costs, helping you drive more profitable revenue growth.

Servicing

Client service is core to the independent brokerage's value proposition. Quickly finding and understanding information needed to assist your clients while accurately maintaining records and documentation is key to helping your servicing teams deliver higher value to your clients while reducing your account management costs. Our Voice of the Customer survey found that in addition to renewals, service team members spend almost their entire day managing customer communications and policy changes. Efficiency is the most valuable benefit of a broker management system, but these routine tasks remain highly inefficient.

Accessible from within the management system or Microsoft Outlook, an AI-amplified servicing tool enables brokerage staff to access information and execute tasks like identifying accounts, adding activities, and auto-summarizing emails with seamless data connectivity. Using management system policy and account data, policy and endorsement documents, and customer communication, users can prompt and answer frequent questions about policy details, account information, and more to quickly find the information they need to service their clients’ needs.

AI-assisted servicing helps brokerages increase overall productivity with smart, time-saving tools across the most common, manual day-to-day brokerage tasks. Managing and saving emails to a management system can take half as long and answering simple to complex questions can happen in seconds rather than 20+ minutes. Less time spent on inefficient tasks means more time spent on building and nurturing client relationships.

Core Innovation & Connectivity

By focusing on the Digital Roundtrip in management systems, brokerages are empowered with unparalleled connectivity and streamlined workflows. Leveraging robust automation and real-time data insights, next-gen tech focused on core innovation and connectivity will ensure that every aspect of your business operates at peak efficiency. This integrated approach not only enhances brokerage productivity but also provides a solid foundation for sustainable growth.

As we continue emphasizing a customer-centric approach, leveraging insurance technology for secure and transparent transactions will be critical. The evolution of these technologies is shaping the modern insurance landscape, ensuring that brokerages remain competitive and innovative. With advanced interfaces, brokerages can interact more efficiently with their clients, enhancing the overall experience.