Reflections from the Insurance Innovators Claims and Fraud Event 2022
The 2020 Insurance Innovators event was the last live event we attended prior to the first lockdown, and what a pleasure it was to finally be face to face again seeing some familiar faces and some new ones. The conference opened with a backdrop of a tube strike and to see such a wide audience who battled their way into London was amazing.
As always you learn so much. My key takeaways were:
Significant increase in insurance fraud
Let’s start with the headline grabber, Mark Button, of the University of Portsmouth reported a significant rise in insurance related fraud from March 19-March 2021 of 67.3%. Let’s put that in context of the other stats shared. Overall there has been an increase in the fraud rate of 26.3% and an increase in the rate of recorded fraud of 7.8%. All of these figures are scary, but look how much the rise in the insurance fraud rate stands out. We all have work to do.
Need for real time insights for real time decisions
Driven by the need to serve customers faster and more accurately, to align the great demands of enhanced customer experience with counter fraud, a paradigm shift from batch data washes to real time detection was discussed. It was acknowledged in several sessions that digital transformation can leave insurers vulnerable to increasingly sophisticated fraudsters who love a digital process to exploit. The ability to surface data in real time to allow real time decisions will help protect the insurer from emerging threats across the lifecycle.
Ghost Broking as a concerning trend
Panellists reported that they had not seen significant changes in application fraud, but the key issue here remains ghost broking, which Julia Walker-Smith of BGL referenced. Of particular concern is the fact that it targets some of the most vulnerable in our society via social media. We’ve spoken about this before in these blogs:
Our view that real time network analytics is a vital component of the defences insurers need going forward. It’s also clear that more education of the public is required to protect those who are vulnerable to this type of fraud.
See you next time
Overall, it was a fantastic event, with lots of valuable learning opportunities, but even better the chance to meet face to face again was refreshing. If you want to catch up, we’ll be presenting at Insurance Innovators Nordics, Germany and USA later this year. Feel free to stop by our booth to get some of our honest chocolate.
