Most life insurers say they currently use little or no automation, according to a survey from Willis Towers Watson.
The Actuarial Reporting Automation survey quizzed life and property and casualty (P&C) insurers on how they use automation in their valuation and reserving processes and where they aspire to use it in the future.
Life insurers said they used either ‘no automation’ or merely ‘some automation’, adding that assumption processes were their least automated core areas of a valuation process, while data processes had seen the greatest investment to date.
However, the survey showed life insurers aspired to deploy ‘some’ or ‘strong’ automation over the next five years, with assumptions, audit trail and results production the top three core areas of the valuation process they will focus on.
“There are significant opportunities for life and P&C insurers to embrace automation,” Max Drannikov, global product leader for business process excellence at Willis Towers Watson said.
“We have seen life insurers gain value from automation around model point grouping, allocation of IFRS 17 cohorts and economic capital processes.”
“Automation is not just about technology and selecting the right tool for the job,” Drannikov added.
He noted that insurers should consider all possibilities when looking at which processes to automate and the level of re-engineering required.
“Further, the impact of Covid and various global lockdowns coupled with current uncertainty around the speed of recovery from the pandemic has also accelerated the drive for automation, which has rapidly moved up on the C-suite agenda over the last year, with many looking to activate such plans,” he added.
