Digitizing claims. (E-Fusion conference: Managing; Technology).

Reinsurer GE ERC has completed a one-year effort to move its claims processing from manual to digital, with major improvements in efficiency, accuracy and quality of service, company Chairman Ron Pressman said.

Pressman chided insurers for their slowness in adopting technology beyond the back-office processing chores in which computers have been used for decades. He said that 80% of the "knowledge" workers in the industry, and 80% of its customers, still transact business manually--which doesn't bode well for insurers' interaction with younger generations that will have grown up working on laptops. "It's mind-boggling, the first impression we're giving people who come to work for us and people who come to buy our products," he said.

The cost of operations, where insurers now focus most of their use of technology, is just one-tenth of loss costs, he said, which means relatively little reward for further improving efficiency in those areas. By comparison, applying technology to acquire data at the underwriting end of the business, and using that data to drive down loss costs, would carry high rewards for even a 1% improvement, he said.

Last year GE ERC set an ambitious goal--to move its claims processing from manual to digital in a year. Completed on schedule, project results included a 60% improvement in accuracy; a drop in the claims backlog from 16,000 documents to 200; and a 24-hour turnaround time on capturing every claim digitally. In the process, the company also is capturing service data digitally, he said.

Data, he stressed, is central. "It is our whole game," Pressman said.