Life in the insurance industry is full of decisions based on rules. Does a potential customer meet the basic qualifications? How does a rate change based on the answers provided on a form? What is the maximum value of a policy? What is the agent’s commission for an individual customer? These decisions, whether they be about policies, constraints, or calculations, are easier to make with a rules engine in place.

A rules engine determines the logic for your business processes. Take, for example, the processing of a form. Using a simple true/false logic, you can set rules to determine how a form moves through your organization. When someone submits a policy request form, a rule performs a simple check to see if the form is filled out completely. A “true” forwards it on to the next rule; a “false” sends it back to the customer. You can build additional rules that trigger additional actions, moving the application form through the necessary steps until it is either approved or denied.

Rules engines do more than just move a form down the line. For a loan application, a rule may also assign a rate to the application. Rules based on income, credit score, and other qualifying criteria are run through the rules engine to perform calculations that result in the loan’s rate. By leveraging the ability to reach external data through APIs, this rule always relies on the most recent financial data to make this decision.

Benefits of Using a Rules Engine

According to Consultancy.UK, two-thirds of the British workforce would prefer to automate the most repetitive aspects of their work. Doing this frees up quite a bit of time for working on other strategic business initiatives. However, more time for other things is not the only benefit gained by using a rules engine in the insurance industry. Automation helps your business in other ways as well. Some things you can do with automation include:

• Move from quote to cash more quickly. Letting automated processes take over from the moment a quote is prepared helps create new policies much more quickly than if you were to do this manually. This gets the paperwork in front of your customers and cash in your pocket more quickly.
• Remove human error from automated tasks. When your rules engine performs calculations on things such as rates and commissions, you aren’t subject to the mistakes a person may make.
• Reduce delays. One of the things that holds up new policies is the process involved with paperwork around insurance forms. Workers spend inordinate amounts of time searching for paperwork and information. Sequential rules applied to the workflows surrounding insurance forms move documentation along the right path and keep a log of where the documentation is in the process. This means policy paperwork is signed more quickly and claims are paid out faster to keep customers happy.

In addition to process automation for insurance, the right rules engine offers you flexibility because it doesn’t lock you into one solution. You have the ability to create rules called by any of your existing applications through the solution’s API. With this layer interacting with your other applications, there is no need to retrain employees on a new platform or UI. You may be able to extend an application’s capabilities by leveraging a rules engine that allows for white-labeling of its technology.

With Decisions, you have the ability to automate, maintain, test, and deploy rules that help your insurance agency manage forms, rates, and commissions without the need to write a single line of code. To see more about the rules capabilities of the Decisions platform, take a few minutes to review these short videos and see how you can start automating the tasks that are slowing your business down. If you would like to discuss your particular use case, we would love to hear about it. Please contact us at sales@decisions.com.