Redefining Travel Insurance Claims Process With Intelligent Document Processing (IDP)

Efficient management of business processes with available resources is a major challenge for many businesses today. Insurance enterprises that rely heavily on paper-based systems have been struggling with data processing, primarily because most of the data is unstructured and available across formats – online portals, PDFs, scanned documents, or physical documents. 

Being able to classify the data collated, extract data, and sort the data based on its functionality continues to remain a challenge as it relies on manual intervention. It leads to complex workflows, delayed processing times, high costs, increased errors, and fraud.

The one area in insurance that is most crucial is “Claims”, which is also a major pain point for the company. When filing insurance claims,  the process is slow, cumbersome, and quite lengthy, for both customers and insurers. Claims processing involves high volumes of document processing, dealing with constantly changing regulations, and growing customer expectations. 

If insurers hope to redefine this entire process, it can be achieved by accelerating the process, optimizing operational costs, and offering high levels of customer satisfaction. To keep up with the growing pressures of the market and customer demands, enterprises should adopt modernization and innovation.

Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) is an advanced solution that can ease this process, and help insurers address all the challenges. In this post, we look at how IDP can redefine the way travel insurance claims are processed.

Travel Insurance Claims Scenario

When planning a holiday, it is always wise to purchase travel insurance as it provides additional protection if the trip doesn’t go as planned. This is quite essential especially if you are traveling alone, and find yourself stranded with no way back home, or dealing with a mishap. 

Unlike other forms of insurance, travel insurance is for a shorter period and comes into consideration only when a customer is traveling – business or personal.  Therefore, when a claim is submitted, the policyholder and insurer aspire to close out the claim settlement seamlessly and without any delay.

Claim Initiation: The first step is when the policyholder fills out a claim form (hard copy or online version) to initiate the claim settlement process.

Document Submission: If it is international travel-based insurance, the policyholder needs to provide supporting documents – tickets, flight information, identification proof, a passport copy. The most important document would be the travel insurance policy they had purchased at the time of planning the trip. This document needs to have the policyholder’s details – policy number, policy details, and other relevant information to verify the policy coverage.

Exception Handling: If the policyholder has to cancel the trip due to medical reasons, they need to provide the doctor’s statement stating the issue/condition that prevents them from flying. In case of baggage loss/delay, the customer needs to offer correspondence from the airlines or airport authorities verifying the same.

Claim Settlement and Payment: Now that the policyholder has spent time providing all necessary documents, the insurer begins their process of verifying the documents, authenticating the claim, and ensuring there is no fraudulent activity. Once clearance is received, the customer receives updates on the final settlement, and the payment is made. 

The claims process is quite detailed and takes weeks, sometimes longer to process depending on the complexity of the situation, and the documents provided. But this could leave the customer frustrated by the time settlement is made, therefore, this function needs a solution that will speed up the process and make it seamless.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, people have shifted their priorities where insurance has moved up on the list, but travel insurance is not on their priority list. The claims process across all types of insurance needs to be redefined to offer better customer satisfaction and to boost business growth.

Intelligent Automation in Insurance

Having understood the demands of the market and customers, insurers have integrated automation into claims processing. They have observed the visible increase in efficiency and accuracy with speeding up the entire claims handling process. Intelligent document processing also enables AI document management making the entire claims process automated. To understand how IDP can transform the entire business workflow and the customer journey, read on.

Smart Capture: In case of a flight delay, if the delay exceeds a certain period of time, the customer can scan their boarding pass, ticket, front & last pages on their passport along with other relevant documents, and upload them through the mobile app or a web link provided by the insurance company customer care to initiate the claim.

Recognition: The artificial intelligence service automatically recognizes the type and intent of documents uploaded by the customer and automatically notifies the customer of any missing documents before proceeding to the next stage. 

Classification & Indexing: The documents are classified and categorized based on type – passport or driver’s license, boarding pass, airline correspondence, and so on. During the classification process, the scanned documents are analyzed and mapped against a predefined template within the system. For example, if there are two document templates A and B predefined in the system, during the classification stage, the system will read the document provided and identify which template it belongs to – Template A or B.

Extraction: The next stage is where the intelligent document processing solution intelligently captures entities or ROIs (Regions of Interest) and extracts all data. Using an OCR engine to digitize the documents, and built-in pre-trained modules, the solution extracts specific and relevant data points from the documents – passport number, travel destination, flight timings and details, policy number, claimed amount, etc.

Validation: The data extracted is first compared against the information filled in the application form to show the verification status. The data then goes through a series of complex validation rules and an AI-driven business-rules engine to eliminate the possibility of a fraudulent claim and prevent claims leakage. An automated service checks the airline website to determine whether the flight was delayed or not.

Verification: Based on the confidence threshold limit set by the user, if there is a discrepancy, those areas are flagged by the system. A Business Process Management process is triggered to notify the policyholder for further investigation and review. The policyholder receives a notification with a request to provide additional documents for verification.

Integration: Once the necessary documents are uploaded and data is thoroughly verified, it is integrated into the claims process and the claim request is forwarded to the finance & accounting department for payment processing. This is the final stage where the customer receives a notification through an email.

While intelligent process automation will ease the entire travel insurance claim process, one element to keep in mind is that travel claims carry the highest fraud risk.

There are known instances where a claim was made under false pretexts, and this leads to loss of money, time, and effort for the insurance company. It spans across opportunistic frauds based on fictitious or exaggerated claims and the growing trend of sophisticated schemes perpetrated by professional fraudsters.

Unfortunately, due to the high volume and low complexity of travel insurance claims, most carriers do not have the resources or the technology to detect and investigate suspected fraudulent claims effectively.

Intelligent Document Processing Application in Insurance

Incorporating Intelligent Document Processing into the system would allow insurers to quickly analyze the high volume of information across structured and unstructured data, such as images and scanned documents. Fortunately, this AI-driven solution can help insurers detect suspicious activity quickly and accurately.

A major advantage to digitizing claims processing is that modernizing core claims systems will help insurers build strategies around risk prevention and mitigation. AI-enabled fraud detection tool combines analysis, fraud detection and offers a streamlined claims process. 

The bottom line being, the customers will experience faster claims settlement, and insurers will experience an increase in efficiency and ability to boost sales and obtain up-selling opportunities through better customer engagement.

Neutrinos Low-Code Platform offers an advanced AI-Powered IDP solution for insurance companies and enterprises looking to streamline crucial business processes. Read more about Neutrinos’ IDP here.

Are you looking to automate document processing in your business?

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