Augmented decisioning within the digital underwriting process Qorus Innovation in Insurance Awards 2023

The Zurich Underwriting team has set a global precedent by enabling medical screening requests to be sent and received electronically through a health screening provider, United Healthcare Group. The new solution: • fully automates underwriting decisions and the application workflow for customers that have been asked to complete a medical examination or blood test • allows Underwriting decisions to be made faster with a higher level of accuracy by structuring the medical data we receive through our underwriting engine. Four months post-project launch, Zurich was able to: • assess automatically and electronically 45% of the new business retail life insurance applications received • issue policies faster than before and significantly reduce any friction or pain points. In April 2022, Zurich’s ever-growing vision to elevate the customer and adviser experience led the organisation to further increase automation within the new business application process by enhancing its Underwriting Rules Engine so that it can support augmented decisioning. Zurich’s hypothesis was that an augmented decisioning module upgrade to the Underwriting Rules Engine would enable Zurich to: • automatically assess common structured evidence data such as short insurance medical exams and pathology testing • combine multiple electronic assessments per customer • utilising structured data flows from their medical services provider The Zurich Digital Underwriting team kicked off the project in April and successfully deployed the augmented decisioning upgrade in December 2022. An incredible amount of time, effort, and technical skill set was required to navigate through uncharted waters to deploy such an ambitious (and incredibly technical) initiative. Several enhancements were made to the service integration between Zurich, United Healthcare Group (UHG, Zurich’s health services provider), and UnderwriteMe (UME, Zurich’s Underwriting engine service provider). A few notable examples: • Augmented decisioning required medical test results to be in a structured data format. Zurich collaborated extensively with UHG to upgrade its medical test collection process so that UHG’s test results were in a structured data format so that Zurich could utilise this data to apply system-driven decisions on the results received. • Zurich’s Digital Underwriting and Data Science teams: • analysed the data structure and a sample of 1000 customers • created an in-house data conversion tool to extract key data elements from the medical results to: • Perform an underwriting assessment. • Store the results in secure tables so that process automation can be achieved. • Zurich had to deploy the augmented decisioning module provided by UnderwriteMe so that Zurich could: • perform automated underwriting of the new blood testing and medical exam dataset • link the assessment directly back to the customer’s disclosures within their original insurance application to deliver a final decision tailored to each customer. • Zurich had to upgrade its underwriting workflow process and platform so that: • the underwriting rules engine assessment was added to the workflow • outstanding Underwriting requirements were completed automatically. The upgrades above enabled workflow cases to only appear an underwriting action is required. Zurich now completes these assessments automatically, with the added benefit of enhanced insights using the new data flows.