Automation Potential in: Binding
low Potential to Automate:
Approval of binders
Medium Potential to automate:
High potential to automate
Binder preparation, binder/policy matching, Agreement distribution, Binder Management
today's Challenges
Use of binders is a common practice in the property and casualty industry. An agency’s use of binders is governed by location, regulations, and the agency’s contracts with insurance companies.
The binder is written representation of coverage that is to be issued by the company, and therefore must contain enough specifics that it can be relied on to make a coverage determination if a loss should occur prior to policy issuance. As the binder is a substitute for a policy and is subject to all the terms and conditions of the policy, it must be canceled in accordance with the cancellation provisions specified in the policy.
The problem today is that agreements with brokers and carriers are not distributed to all personnel, binders are not prepared at the same time as the coverage, and certificates and documents often sit in different silos.
Automation Impact Evaluation
Binder Preparation: As we have noted in other stages of the role of automation is simply to streamline the gathering of information. With the use of RPA (Robotic process automation) customer details can instantly be extracted from the ERP reformatted as desired and populated in the relevant file format or system.
Binder and Policy Matching: In some cases where the policy and binders are not prepared at the same time, some details may vary or information may be copied over incomplete or in the incorrect place. Automation can be used to scan documents, extract key information and match and verify. Where discrepancies do occur all parties can be notified.
Agreement Distribution: As well as gathering, verifying and storing all the necessary information, Automation can also be used to notify all stakeholders within the supply chain and the customer themselves. This is just another example of a small task (finding documents, attaching documents, sending email) that can be completely removed through automation.
Binder Management: There is bespoke software on the market specifically for binder management, but this can largely be circumnavigated with RPA. Rather than creating another silo for information to sit, RPA will work with the software you already have, gather and store the relevant documents and working in conjunction with OCR can scan and digitise information from PDF certificates where desirable.