Insurance Carriers Use Digital Payments and AI to Shorten End-to-End Claims Process

Like many industries, insurers are also being rocked by macro pressures.

“What we’re seeing are resource challenges and supply chain issues across the insurance industry,” Kelli Svymbersky, VP of payments at software-as-a-service platform CCC Intelligent Solutions Inc. (CCC), told PYMNTS.

And the insurers — in a bid to secure customer loyalty — want to get money into their customers’ bank accounts as quickly as possible.

The claims process, of course, is notoriously complex across the multi-trillion-dollar industry, and it can take weeks from the time a claim is filed to the time that a payment is disbursed. The insurers themselves are but one party in the mix, and there are other providers in the insurance ecosystem, too, including auto repair shops and auto lenders, to name just a few. The insurers typically have to make multiple payments to several parties at once.

The end customers?

Well, they can be left with less-than-transparent insight into how much they’ll be paid and when. It’s the customer experience that ultimately determines whether they’ll stay with a provider or not — and PYMNTS data show that 66% of consumers say they would stay loyal to businesses offering free, instant disbursement options.

Countering the Headwinds

And to counteract those pressures, she said, property and casualty firms are looking for ways to harness technological innovation. CCC’s payments solution, with automated “direction to pay,” she said, can cement even greater connectivity among those stakeholders by stitching embedded payments into the connective tissue of this network — and into the claims process itself.

The company is actively injecting artificial intelligence (AI) into key aspects of the claims process to help carriers speed and improve their decision-making while delivering better experiences for their insured customers. Recently, the company reported that it had processed more than 14 million unique claims on behalf of customers using its AI solutions, an increase of 3x since before the pandemic. Payments and pre-payment workflows are now part of the company’s end-to-end digitization efforts, significantly reducing points of friction inherent in the process.

As she put it, “We’re powering the digitization of claims for insurers and the ecosystem partners in the claims process.” At a high level, she said, embedded payments and straight-through processing are designed to automate, streamline and speed up back-end workflows — shortening the time to pay out claims to customers or B2B vendors (who do the repair work) to mere minutes, not days or weeks, in most cases.

“This provides a better experience for insurance carrier users and to their customers as well,” said Svymbersky.

As designed by CCC, the “direction to pay” function allows vehicle owners to authorize payments directly to a shop within the CCC platform. The automated triggering of a payment sends funds to the payee in the payment method of their choice. The potential to automate and digitize these transactions is significant, as Svymbersky said the CCC network/platform sees $100 billion of transactions annually.

She noted that there are at least some challenges in getting insurers to look beyond one-off payment solutions and embrace end-to-end digitization.

Challenging the status quo — the paper-based processes, unnecessary manual reviews and paper checks — is never easy. But the advantage of a platform model, she said, is that it enables insurers to keep up with customers’ payment preferences and expectations.

“Ultimately,” she said, “we can help keep the insurer up to date on offering multiple payment methods,” adding that “the carrier doesn’t actually have to have that payment tech stack inside their organization. We’re taking that on and taking on some of that technical lift for them.”

CCC, she said, sees opportunities to expand payment automation.

“We have a very far-reaching network,” she said, “and are looking to embed payments in insurer and repairer workflows, supporting a variety of B2B and B2C use cases and payment methods. We’re just in the early innings of building out new capabilities for payments.”