Automating onboarding for insurance agents

Automating onboarding for insurance agents

Insurance companies rely heavily on their agents as a sales channel. But this channel has it’s own share of problems. Mis-selling and frauds by agents has been a big problem for insurance companies and IRDA for a long time now. The insurance penetration in India is less than 4% which makes it one of the lowest globally. One of the reasons for this low penetration is the complex nature of insurance products and the lack of a well-trained force of selling agents make it even harder.

Insurance companies have gone online to address some problems with agent-based channel, but Indians rely a lot on word-of-mouth and trusted guidance which means insurance companies cannot do way with agents. So, while on one side insurance companies would want more trained staff, they also want proper verification and due diligence on them as per the guidelines. That’s where today’s authentication technology and automated onboarding comes to their rescue making these onboarding process seamless, quick and efficient.

 

Onboarding PoS vs. Corporate agents:

IRDA introduced PoS (point of sales agent), to increase insurance penetration in the country. A typical insurance agent can only sell the insurance plan of the hiring company. Point of sales (PoS) persons hired directly by insurers or by intermediaries such as corporate agents and insurance brokers can sell insurance products with minimal underwriting, for multiple companies. The regulatory compliances of onboarding the two types of agents vary, as per IRDA guidelines, and hence the checks w.r.t education, identity, employer associations also differ, but slightly. Minimum age of 18 years and minimum educational; qualification of passing 10th class is mandatory for PoS, as opposed to 10+2 for agents.

 

Why should you verify agents before onboarding?

IRDA mandates the due diligence of a prospective agent/ PoS to ensure a fraud-free work environment for the companies. Mis-selling and premium pocketing can create negative sentiments towards the industry, among its customers who might not understand the product features and importance.

Real-time verifications become more than the need of the hour in such cases, for not only combating agent frauds but also ensuring customer’s trust and streamlined revenue. The faster the onboarding process, the faster agents can be on the field, pushing new business and gaining new business for your company.

 

How AuthBridge automates the agent onboarding?

The technical training for a POS agent takes around 15 hours and for an insurance agent a minimum of 100 hrs. The ideal manual verification and onboarding can take more than the training time. Hence, a more automated and real-time verification process can really make a difference.

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AuthBridge’s real-time agent onboarding solutioncan power your agent onboarding with self-service and real-time verifications. It can help increase agent retention and satisfaction by almost 80%. Our digital PAN and Aadhaar verifications can help to identify the candidate in a couple of minutes.

Our agent verification APIs can ascertain that the applicant does not hold agency appointments for more than one life insurer, one general insurer, one health insurer, and is not in the centralized list of blacklisted agents.

Remote and Contactless Digital Onboarding of Customers in Insurance Industry

Remote and Contactless Onboarding of Customers in Insurance Industry

Automating customer onboarding has been discussed since a while now, across industries. But, with the pandemic posing restriction of physical interactions and movement, companies have been pushed to explore completely digital onboarding and contactless verification of their customers. The latest development for the insurance sector has come with IRDA allowing eKYC for some insurance players.

Easy sign-up process, paperless / contactless verification and quick turn-around are becoming the value-added propositions for the Insurance brands. With the introduction of Video KYC by RBI, the in-person verification processes are transitioning to a video-based approach of customer identification.

Reducing reliance on Legacy systems for manual customer verification

Let us understand the gaps in the manual verification processes in insurance before explaining the importance of AI-enabled verification automation.

A customer provides demographic details along with his/her email id and mobile number with the insurance company (via website, call or agent). An executive may then visit the customer, fill the required details, gather Proof of Identity and Proof of Address documents, along with customer photos, get physical signatures on the forms, and schedule medical checkups if applicable. Post this an underwriter verifies information manually and approves or disapproves of an application. Approved applications are shared with the customer via post, or through electronic insurance copies.

Read Also:-AuthBridge’s Video KYC: Towards a presence-less and paperless banking

Physical visits for document collection and liveness verification, especially in the Corona era, is not feasible. Further manual processing of applications, verifying details, taking physical signatures on forms, increase the policy Issuance TAT up to a month, ideally. Document tampering is undetectable by the naked eye. The operational costs of visits and verifications are extra burden on running the businesses.

In such a tedious process, with steps vulnerable to fraud/tampering/crime, the company practically runs at risk levels of various proportion. Moreover, such processes create a poor customer experience, especially for the tech-savvy generation who wish to look for personalized experiences from the comfort of their home and almost instantaneously.

 

The Future of Insurance Customer Onboarding is here

Just like other industries, Insurance companies are also adapting to the digitization of processes for remort customer onboarding. The growth of technologically advanced customers is leading to the creation of journeys that are automated with transaction capabilities, quick enough to complete the process in few clicks, without too many touchpoints or support calls from the companies. Robotic process automation and AI-based authentication technologies are already showing great potential. For an industry where death before policy cases, identity and financial frauds are common, physical verification anyway becomes difficult in tier 2 cities and beyond. When due diligence and verification have become more stringent from the regulatory perspective, onboarding process automation ensures that paperwork does not slow down the issuance process.

How AuthBridge can create a seamless journey for your customers:

AuthBridge’s automated Customer onboarding solutions incorporate identity, reputation, financial, and liveness checks of a customer via APIs, guarantying the least amount of manual intervention during the processing.

Liveness detection via AuthBridge’s Banking grade video-based KYC and Video PD can catch identity frauds and help to manage a contactless pre-issuance verification that too in real-time, with video/audio log files for future audit purposes, to simplify and underwriter’s job for authentication and information validation

Our digital document processing platform, SignDrive can enables insurance providers to keep a track on the flow of documents within various departments and help to create legally enforceable electronic and digital signatures reducing the need on wet signatures, ensuring all legal formalities can be completed in a paperless, presence less and contactless manner.

address verification

Verifying an individual’s address with our digital Address Verification solution reduces dependency on executive connect and verify her/his current/ permanent address with real-time image-based KYC and geo-triangulation of location coordinates.

With our Intelligent Authentication and Risk mitigation technologies, we can help to catch fraud in real-time to help you onboard only genuine customer, by painting a 360-degree view of an individual’s identity, financial and reputational datapoints.

Conclusion

With industry players moving towards a transparent and client-centric solution, from lead to sales conversion, along with keeping up with regulatory changes, customer onboarding is seeing a face uplift.

Real-time automation technologies must work in parallel with people and processes to ensure solutions that cater to need of customers. Drop a mail at sales@authbridge.com to know how business platforms like yours can partner with AuthBridge and improve their onboarding processes and customer experience by ~70%.

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The most noteworthy aspects of our collaboration has been the ability to seamlessly onboard partners from all corners of India, for which our TAT has been reduced from multiple weeks to a few hours now.

- Mr. Satyasiva Sundar Ruutray
Vice President, F&A Commercial,
Greenlam

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