Survey Finds Insurers Planning To Increase Automation Adoption

Global insurers plan to accelerate their use of automation over the next 5 years, according to a new survey from Willis Towers Watson.

Both property-casualty and life insurers are looking to improve efficiency and auditability and close the gap between their current use of automation and where they'd like to be, Willis Towers Watson's Actuarial Reporting Automation Survey found.

The survey collected information from insurers about how they use automation today in the property-casualty reserving and life valuation processes and their automation aspirations for the future.

"Insurers are looking to transform actuarial processes to achieve greater efficiency and efficacy, enabling more granular analysis and more frequent and timelier insights from their data," Joe Milicia, global proposition leader, Business Process Excellence, Insurance Consulting and Technology, at Willis Towers Watson, said in a statement.

"Unfortunately, achieving this is a challenge due to several barriers, including limited time, staff, and poor data quality," Mr. Milicia said. "To achieve their objectives, the first step for insurers is to leverage automation to create the time and space necessary to invest in and achieve their ambitions."

Most property-casualty insurers surveyed said they currently use no or some automation and indicated that engagement with senior management was their least automated core area of the current reserving process. Data processes were property-casualty insurers' most automated function, the survey found.

The survey found that property-casualty insurers aspire to some or strong automation over the next 5 years, with assumptions, audit trail, and senior management engagement the top three core areas of their future focus in the reserving process.

"Automation is not just about technology and selecting the right tool for the job," Mr. Milicia said. "Insurers should consider all possibilities when looking at which processes to automate and the level of re-engineering required. Identifying quick wins to free up time that can be reinvested toward a large-scale transformation is often a key enabler of clients' automation ambitions. The whole team must be engaged throughout deployment to ensure they embrace the solution."