The state of bot automation in Canadian brokerages

Brokerages in Ontario are rapidly embracing bots to automate repetitive tasks, the provincial brokerage association told Canadian Underwriter. 

“Like all new technology, it takes time to drive awareness and articulate value, but the adoption curve seems to have accelerated more quickly than other technologies,” Norah Black, vice president of marketing and communications at the Insurance Brokers Association of Ontario (IBAO), said in an email. “Vendors have realized there’s real opportunity in the insurance market to automate repetitive tasks, and brokerages have realized bots are a positive antidote to some of their human resource pressures.” 

Brokerages are using single and multiple bots to perform different tasks, Black reported. They typically start with bots for daily insurance rating or customer services tasks such as renewal reviews or document management.  

“But there are untapped areas of opportunity like finance or M&A — reconciling or calculating commission cheques, or merging data from one BMS to a centralized BMS,” Black said. “There is no need to re-key or re-enter data from one system to another anymore.” 

Also, a growing list of vendors is providing these services to brokerages in Ontario and across the country. Two such companies are Vancouver-based Quandri and Toronto-based Clementine Tech Inc. 

Quandri builds AI-powered bots to replace repetitive work with higher-value work. “Insurance professionals are overwhelmed by the high volume of manual repetitive work required,” said Quandri CEO Jackson Fregeau. “We have trained intelligent robots that solve these challenges by automating tedious and time-consuming insurance work, empowering insurance professionals to focus on more valuable work.”

Curtis Samoy is the founder of Clementine Tech, a robotic process automation (RPA) provider that builds bots for insurance brokerages. He currently has about 20 custom bots live in about 10 different brokerages in Canada (mostly in Ontario), but also has more bot requests coming from new and existing clients every day. 

“The one thing I’m finding is at every single brokerage that I’m in, once I deliver the first bot, they are all clamouring for more bots,” Samoy told CU in an interview. “They want more; they have a lot of processes.” 

Related: How one company is tackling brokers’ pain point of repetitive data entry

Bots are used for things like sifting through and summarizing eDocs and commission reconciliations, for example, Samoy said. “Let’s let the bots do what computers should be good at, so that the humans don’t have to worry about it, and they can spend more time chatting with people, because that’s what humans are supposed to do.” 

IBAO noted one barrier to implementing these bots is the perception they’re going to take over people’s jobs. “Instead they should think of it as repurposing human talent to higher valued tasks,” Black said in her email. “Brokerages just need to prioritize the project and assign a resource to monitor progress.” 

One major advantage is that bots can help retrieve data that brokers may otherwise feel powerless to access. “If our BMS is going to force us to put data in here where I can’t get it out effectively, maybe we can have a bot that gets it out effectively,” Samoy said. 

On the flip side, one barrier to implementation could be speed and processing time challenges, particularly since the technology is relatively new. For example, a brokerage pulling in 400 or 500 eDocs a day may find “the bots aren’t much faster than a human,” Samoy said. The bot will still have to click through a user interface and execute all the same actions as a human. “[The bots] just do it tirelessly.” 

Time savings would be determined by the tasks being automated and vary by vendor. One task that takes an employee an hour a day could be automated 100%, for example. Larger brokerages that have three people doing the same task for the same amount of time would see triple the time savings. 

The costs of these bots are also decreasing. “Brokerages are often surprised by the affordability of this technology,” IBAO said. 

An RPA bot could be built in a week, as opposed to a six- or eight-month software project that could cost $100,000, Samoy said. “It turns around very, very quickly. And people see the results quickly, so that’s gaining steam.” 

 

Feature image by iStock.com/NicoElNino