There are some excellent use cases of Power BI, Power Apps and Power Automate in action within the Financial Services and Insurance sector.
Microsoft is leading the way in digital evolution of the Insurance sector, bringing over 400 enhancements to Dynamics 365 and Power Platform in the most recent release. The tech giant’s investment in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and low-code, no-code technologies support insurance businesses with the on-going digital skills gap and enable business users of varying capabilities to build apps, visualisations and workflows and improve business performance via simple point-and-click technology.
Incremental works closely with our Insurance clients to maximise use of the latest releases. Our clients have undergone rapid digital transformation with Microsoft Dynamics 365 business applications in recent years, making progress to shatter barriers between departments. Insurers no longer approach each policy, person or departments as standalone, but as part of a connected universe of data that provides valuable insights to business performance. The Power Platform – with its integrated AI-infused technologies – opens unlimited opportunity to harness the power of that data-unification. With hundreds of data connectors and a toolkit built on a common data language, insurers can achieve peak productivity, maximise engagement and provide data-driven decision making to manage brokers, customers, products, policies and claims.
This being said, many of the new clients we meet are unsure about the Power Platform and how to deploy it within their organisations. And more importantly, why they should invest.
So, what is the Power Platform?
The Power Platform can be summed up in four keywords: analyse, act, automate and engage.
The Power Platform combines the capabilities of four key products – Power BI, Power Apps (including Power Apps Portals), Power Automate and Power Virtual Agents. With Microsoft’s proprietary technology, users of all skill-levels, from pro-developers to authorised administrators can analyse, act-upon and automate data in ways that have never been possible before.
The Power Platform is built upon the Common Data Platform and the tools are designed to work together for maximum business value. All users with suitable permissions can quickly and easily build custom apps that solve immediate business pain, automate complex workflows to improve business productivity, and analyse data for insights – no matter their technical expertise or capabilities.
Act with Power Apps for Insurance
Power Apps allow everyone from developers to business users within your insurance business to create interactive apps that support with specific business scenarios from claims processing and renewals, to risk and compliance. Whether developing an app for a specific use case within Dynamics 365 or standalone, your in-house teams will be able to react at pace to ever-changing customer, partner, product, claims and compliance needs, all without writing a single line of code.
Integrating with Dynamics 365, the Dataverse, third party applications, Power BI and Power Automate, users across your organisation can carry out tasks and complete processes efficiently on their device of choice, with the information flowing back into your other systems.
Sample use cases for Power Apps in Insurance include:
- Improve and complete policyholder on-boarding in real time with bespoke Power Apps and Power Apps Portals, designed to capture the required data for each scenario. Connect this data to the next step action in the process and automate risk and compliance controls too.
- Automate task-led business process flows like renewal processes or escalations for medical underwriting.
- Manage the claims process more efficiently – provide loss adjusters or even customer access to a front-facing app where users can answer required questions, capture and attach jpeg or png photo evidence or PDF and Microsoft Word supplier quotes for repairs.
- Feed responses back into your CRM and automate to next stage with one of hundreds of out-of-the-box Power Automate connectors.
Recent enhancements for Power Apps in Insurance
Recent announcements from Microsoft include the wide release of AI builder for Power Platform. One of our top picks from the functionality is object detection which provides the capability for AI to read, understand and translate photographs of handwritten notes and convert them into Word documents, or analyse text from Excel or PDF and feed into the appropriate Dynamics 365 fields.
The time-saving capabilities of these tools are immense. Anywhere you can rekey data, you can feed to Power App, AI will read, recognise the data and populate it.
Power BI for Insurers
Power BI is Microsoft’s market-leading intelligent business analytics solution. With familiar Excel-like controls, users can connect a multitude of data sources – legacy on-premise, in the cloud or elsewhere – to gain valuable insights, analyse trends and make rapid, data-informed decisions.
Data is nicely visualised, helping teams share insights, collaborate and report across an entire organisation and on any device. With in-built governance and security, sharing customised dashboards and interactive reports with the right teams at the right times becomes process-led, with the right risk controls in place to protect the sensitive information in your insurance business.
Some sample use cases of Power BI in Insurance:
- Power BI allows users to visualise real time insights and analysis of losses from insurance claims. This constant feed of data empowers business users to highlight trends across the business and leverage underwriting data to make prudent business decisions, minimising future losses.
- Create visual reports to analyse your brokers, agencies and intermediary performance levels. Understand which relationships are working well or which may need urgent attention.
- Closely analyse policy and product performance. If a product is performing particularly well within a certain demographic or geographical area, this may inform a reactive marketing campaign or a review of the policy price point.
Automate with Power Automate for Insurers
Microsoft’s Power Automate – again, low code, no-code – puts power to create complex workflows within your organisation. It uses over 250 out-of-the-box connectors to automate all types of processes and removes the risk for human error, which can stall a journey’s progress.
Once the Power Platform has been implemented and adopted by your workforce, Power Automate removes the need for developers to create workflows, heavily reducing costs and implementation time for new business critical or improvement processes.
Like the rest of the Power Platform, Power Automate provides point and click functionality that connects legacy technology infrastructure. Out-of-the-box connectors integrate not only with Microsoft tools but less well-known systems too. Secured within the Microsoft cloud, these workflows provide the functionality to move your insurance business forward.
Some sample use cases of Power Automate in Insurance:
- Power Automate can connect sales journeys, policyholder on-boarding and renewals. Clients or intermediaries complete front-facing Power Apps Portals forms are then connected to the next stage of the process for action, review, risk, approval, decline. With data feeding directly into your CRM, a risk audit trail is created, productivity maximised and data accuracy maintained.
- When call centre activity spikes, for example, storms claims when areas are hit with bad weather, Power Automate can be connected to a quickly deployed bot that can direct clients towards self-service options for logging claims or answering frequently asked questions.
Why invest in the Power Platform?
A recent Economic Impact study of Dynamics and the Power Platform highlighted that the average cost of app development is reduced by 70% with Power Apps and Power Automate, with £2.9 million avoided in application development and management costs. These types of cost savings are indicative of the costs and productivity savings that can be made with each individual solution within the platform.
Combined with no-code capabilities that drive high user adoption, the return on initial investment is high. And with the tools included within the standard Dynamics 365 licensing, it is easy to get started with Power Platform today.
Incremental and the Insurance sector
Incremental is leading radical digital transformation in the Insurance sector, step-by-step with Microsoft. Together, we are helping Insurers understand and engage customer needs and deliver seamless, proactive and personalised experiences. In the new, differentiated marketplace, everything is to play for, from improving underwriting processes, loss ratios and policy lapse rates to reducing customer churn.
If you would like to find out more about how the Power Platform can support your Insurance firm through its next phase of digital transformation, get in touch with our team of specialists to get started today.