Many insurers – even some of the largest – currently manage their reinsurance programs using antiquated methods, including spreadsheets, legacy systems operating in outdated environments, and human intervention.
These systems and processes are increasingly becoming ill-equipped to handle the rigors and requirements of modern reinsurance management. They’re often fragile and prone to failure, contributing to higher operating costs. They’re challenging to integrate with other insurance management systems (if at all, in the case of spreadsheets). They also offer limited access to important data and insights, or don’t collect them at all. Overall, they lack the agility and ability to adapt to changing reinsurance markets and business requirements.
One of the biggest limitations of these outdated systems is their passiveness, relying almost exclusively on human input to operate and produce outputs. This means there are a variety of repetitive and mundane tasks required to run them, which can be time consuming and unrewarding, contributing to job dissatisfaction.
On the other hand, modern reinsurance management solutions are smart and connected – packed with automation, intelligence and integrations, allowing them to automatically perform most, if not all, the manual tasks that humans otherwise would. This gives staff and the business new capacity to spend on more valuable or strategic projects.
Here are the top repetitive and mundane tasks that could be eradicated by switching to a modern reinsurance management solution.
Data inputting
Whether it be formatting and uploading spreadsheets or manually inputting data one… record… at… a… time, data inputting – such as claims or financial information – could soon be a task of the past. Modern reinsurance management solutions naturally integrate with other core insurance solutions, like claims management solutions. This allows them to operate as an ecosystem, automatically sharing data and helping ensure it’s always up-to-date.
Report running
Reporting is an essential part of reinsurance, with various teams needing information regularly to fulfil financial, regulatory, performance and ad hoc requirements. It can be extremely arduous to satisfy all reporting requirements. Existing reports may need to be manually generated, while other regular reports require manual data inputs from multiple sources. For ad hoc reports that need to be built from scratch, it can be a painstaking process locating various data sets from a variety of sources.
Modern solutions come with an array of popular pre-built reports or offer the option of tick box and drag-and-drop features to easily build bespoke ones. Better yet, these reports can be auto-refreshed on a scheduled basis, or at the click of a button.
Communications distribution
These reports, and other regular communications, need to be created and distributed to key stakeholders. Creating templated emails, adding attachments, and addressing and double-checking recipients can be extremely time consuming. Sending sensitive information this way also increase online security risks.
Instead, via modern reinsurance management solutions, necessary regular communication can be auto-produced and their distribution either scheduled or auto-triggered by an event.
Calculating recoverables
Although not a mundane task, calculating recoverables is a high-value task that’s also highly manual and time consuming. Whether recoverables are being calculated following a wide-ranging event or following a year’s worth of auto-insurance claims, the consequences of human error, such as miscalculation, can be costly, including increases in future reinsurance contract costs. Due to their ability to integrate with other core systems, calculating recoverables can become an automatic, rather than a manual, task; and be completed to a much higher accuracy.
There are many issues and risks associated with using antiquated reinsurance management systems, with one of the biggest resulting from their passiveness and reliance on human input for their operation. Insurers still using these outdated reinsurance management systems may find themselves running high numbers of regular and mundane tasks daily, such as inputting data, building and running reports, sending regular communications and even calculating recoverables. These tasks can take a toll on employees and result in negative consequences for the business should human error occur. But with their automations and smarts, modern reinsurance management solutions like Duck Creek Reinsurance, means these tasks are a thing of the past, giving your staff more capacity for more valuable and profitable jobs.
