Eight out of 10 UK insurers recognise hyperautomation as ‘an opportunity’

A recent poll of some of the UK’s largest insurers carried out by analytics and AI leader, SAS, has revealed that 83 per cent of insurers believe hyperautomation provides a real opportunity for the insurance market.

The poll, which was conducted in January 2022, was carried out as part of a panel discussion led by SAS and Microsoft looking at how hyperautomation can help insurers meet their digital first strategy whilst gaining competitive advantage. In total, 30 insurers responded to the poll, including Aviva, Direct Line, Legal & General and Zurich.

Hyperautomation has become a key discussion point among insurers, especially following the impact of the pandemic on driving digitalisation within the sector. For insurers, the pandemic shone a light on how agile they need to be to design, build and launch new products fast, to reflect societal and climate changes and to cover new or increased risks.

Using AI and machine learning, hyperautomation can learn from data, identify problems and absorb new information that can proactively guide insurers’ pricing, marketing and sales strategies. By automating intelligent decisions insurers can achieve customer centricity, placing the customer at the heart of everything they do. It enables them to better harness data to personalise product offers and marketing to customers, while still delivering a fast, frictionless online service.

Adam Goldsmith, Insurance Specialist, SAS UK & Ireland, believes the results of the poll reflects the appetite in the insurance market to adopt a customer-centric approach and an increase in understanding the potential use cases hyperautomation brings to insurance.

“It’s positive to see that so many of the UK’s largest insurers recognise that hyperautomation is an important opportunity for their business, teams and customers. The use cases for it are clear. It can take away the time-consuming manual elements of policy management, underwriting, regulatory compliance and policy pricing, freeing up teams to focus on more value-added tasks like innovation, customer experience and strategy,” explained Goldsmith.

“There’s long been a concern that automation is purely here to replace humans, but with just six per cent of the insurers who responded identifying hyperautomation as a threat, I think this shows the market’s understanding of what benefits it brings to teams.

“It’s clear following the pandemic that insurers need to be more agile yet they also want to be more focused on each individual customer’s needs and how their policies can be personal to them. It’s the way the consumer experience is evolving across many sectors and leading insurers are adopting cloud-based technology solutions like hyperautomation to evolve how they serve their customers.”

The poll did also find that many insurers are yet to adopt hyperautomation for both back office and customer-facing processes. However, it is likely that adoption will increase throughout 2022 as more insurers begin to invest in the technology.

SAS also published research earlier this month that revealed the vast majority (82%) of senior decision makers in businesses across the UK and Ireland believe that hyperautomation will be important in the next 12 months, and two-thirds (67%) have either implemented it already or plan to in the future.

To find out more about the attitudes of business leaders and consumers to hyperautomation, read the report entitled Hyperautomation: Using AI to transform your business.