Impact Winner of the Week: Everest Re (Digital)

Earlier this month, Novarica announced the winners of the ninth annual Novarica Research Council Impact Awards. These awards recognize insurance technology projects that demonstrate real business impact and are selected by insurer CIO members of Novarica’s research council.

Over the next several weeks, we’ll be taking an in-depth look at each of the eight winning case studies. Today’s entry is the first winner in our digital category, Everest Re.

Everest Re’s Impact-winning project built a platform to automate business processes triggered by incoming emails, leveraging AI-enabled technologies. Everest Re completed the project in less than a year and credits it with supporting over $5M in premium growth and $3.5M in efficiency gains across multiple areas of underwriting and claims.

Many insurers still struggle with manual processes at many steps of the product development and sales cycle. In Everest’s case, new business processes and claims processes were the top priority.

Routing incoming email is a perfect example of a process that benefits from automation: the majority of cases result in a small set of possible actions, responding quickly is crucial, and efficiencies scale. Automation also eliminates the potential for human errors present in manual handling and frees resources to focus on more complex cases where AI isn’t as useful.

The project also underscores the importance of clear communication in insurance technology projects. The underlying business rules needed to be clear and well-defined for the decisioning to work. That, in turn, relied on clear communication between the project team and business sponsors.

This case study aligns with two of Novarica’s Three Levers of Value: selling more and costing less to operate. Faster processes created better throughput, leading to increased casualty business premiums. It’s very common for insurers to create automation or new portals that increase sales volumes by making simple processes faster. This has been a running theme among Impact award winners over the last five years.

Everest Re also attributes labor savings of about $3.5M to the project. Technology often increases efficiency for insurers by streamlining legacy processes, although it’s not as common for insurers to measure this impact in hard dollar metrics.

Finally, Everest’s case study shows that AI isn’t just for risk evaluation or underwriting. When scoped appropriately with a clear goal in mind, AI can also be an automation tool that can generate lift in a variety of applications.

Case studies for all winners and 20 other IT projects that Novarica considered for the Impact Awards appear in this year’s Insurance Technology Case Study Compendium, and more than 100 case studies from the last five years are available in Novarica’s research library.

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