Why insurance companies need to make it easier to file claims!

Yesterday our team won the award for best claims technology solution of the year from the Insurance Times. Our team is a mix of people that have done claims their whole life, IT operations experts that know how to operate solutions 24x7, a limited number of innovators plus a bunch of the most impressive partners. We are doing the opposite of what others do and it is working!

The insurance industry sounds boring and if you would have asked a year ago I would have agreed. But after working in this centuries old industry a bit over 11 months, I feel passionate about it now. We solve real problems that are live changing events for customers. The rules of insurance are completely different from other industries. Selling a product is relatively easy. Making a profit is hard. The majority of customers will never ever use the product they bought. Lots of customers find out years later that they have been paying for a useless product.

“Common sense” in the insurance industry says that you focus all your effort on making the quote and buy experience as easy as possible, you hire the best underwriters possible and you try to minimize claim pay-out. This last part is accomplished by making it hard to file a claim. You need to call a call center, scan documents and mail them, cash cheques and other 20th century activities. There is an excess on any claim your insurance pays which in human speak means even if insurer pays your claim, you are going to pay part of the damage yourself. The outcome is that most people who have a claim are underwhelmed by their insurance provider.

Our team took a different approach. We asked ourselves how can we make it as easy as possible for honest customers to file a claim while making it as hard as possible for dishonest customers to do the same? We don’t want dishonest customers but we want many happy honest customers to claim. So after you filed your honest claim, we will do our best to help you as good as we can.

Last year we started a digital experiment around SmartClaim and we have iteratively improved the experience. We are on a digital journey and still need to work hard but the first steps in simplifying filing claims for honest customers have been very positive and award winning.

We would like to thank partners like 360 Global Net, Mad Eden, Helminion, Danger Farms, TCS, Amazon AWS, Claims Consortium Group and others for being our innovation partners. Strong cross company teams bring real innovation to industries.