Know your claimant

Kajal Vakas
Senior manager, claims 
LexisNexis Risk Solutions, Insurance, UK and Ireland

Creating a single customer view will soon help balance the scales between assessing risk and maintaining customer satisfaction as the consumer duty standards loom

 The Association of British Insurers’s (ABI) annual conference this year focused on the new standards of consumer protection coming into force in July. Broadly, the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) consumer duty standards will require insurance providers to act to prevent poor outcomes for their customers at any stage of the customer journey. Claims teams will have noted that consumers should not face ‘unreasonable barriers’ to making a claim.

It would make sense that those insurance providers that take steps to gain a better understanding of the needs of their customers, will be at an advantage when the new rules and guidance becomes effective. It comes down to leveraging the data they already hold to build a single customer view based on every past touch point with that customer to help create a smooth, flawless claims journey.

However, recent merger and acquisition activity, combined switching activity (albeit at much lower levels than prior to the pricing reforms), means customer data management remains a challenge for insurance providers. This puts pressure on claims handlers who don’t have the luxury of time to collate the data required to understand the relationship with the customer and quickly verify who they are dealing with to help prevent fraud.

Imagine then, if a claims professional could gain that consolidated ‘golden record’ for a customer so that they know instantaneously that this is Mrs Brown who has renewed her home insurance policy for the past three years and has never had an insurance claim before.  The same ‘golden record’ could notify the claims professional that Mrs Brown recently downsized and reduced her policy cover accordingly, but her new home has a history of roofing claims. Alternatively, it could be Ms Smith who changed name and moved home after a recent divorce and had multiple successive claims for flooding under her previous name and address. Having this type of knowledge up front not only reduces the onus on the customer to provide information the claims team should already know, it helps determine the strategy for that claim to help ensure the right outcomes for those customers.

Linking and matching technology makes this consolidated view possible. By pulling together data from multiple touchpoints, including quote, renewal, claims and marketing, insurance providers can build a comprehensive and accurate representation of their customer, which is then assigned a unique ID—we call it LexID for Insurance. This gives claims handlers a single version of the truth. They can then bring in further insurance specific data such as the historic claims linked to that individual and/or asset, shared by the market, vastly helping with the efficient and accurate processing of claims.

It is not only having a single customer view that will help make claims handlers jobs easier in the future. Equally importantly, through digital footprints, the possibility to understand the fraud risk related to an individual, at speed, based on email intelligence. Already available and widely used at point of quote, instant email address validation through LexisNexis Emailage Rapid will soon help claims professionals build resilience to claims fraud.

Built on billions of transactions from global payments processors and other online industries, the new email verification solution will use an individual’s unique email address, the most commonly used component of an online transaction. It will then be able to provide an instant risk score, which will help to determine whether the identity used for a claim could be fraudulent, and when used alongside prior claims data, policy history data and data on the asset, a claims handler is in a far more powerful position to manage that claim effectively.

As a provider of data enrichment solutions to the insurance industry, looking at what’s in store for our sector is in our DNA. The need for insurance providers to offer a streamlined claims experience, with robust fraud detection is more important than ever. Data solutions that offer a single customer view and any immediate flags for fraud not only help to balance the scales of assessing risk and maintaining customer loyalty but can also play a vital role in satisfying the needs of the FCA.

Image source: Canva and LexisNexis Risk Solutions

Claims Media