Insight article by Tilda Arvidsson
Solutions Consultant at Upptec
Over the past months, my colleagues at Upptec and I have been on the road visiting over 20 insurance companies across the Nordics and Europe. It’s been days filled with conversations with claims teams, insurance leaders, digitalization leads and IT departments.
And now we’ve reached that time of year when every meeting ends the same way: “Sounds exciting, but let’s do it after summer!”
Okay. So what should we actually do after the vacation? Three insights from the past months have stuck with me and maybe they’ll inspire your “after summer” planning too.
1. Claims is a team sport and your ecosystem is the team
If the spring taught me one thing, it’s how deeply a claim’s outcome depends on everyone around the insurer. The repairer fixing the stove. The building contractor rebuilding after water damage. The large-claims specialists, the restoration companies and all the others involved before a claim is closed.
A policyholder doesn’t only experience your in-house system, they experience the chain. And the chain is only as good as its weakest link. A claim can be settled in minutes and still feel slow if the contractor doesn’t show up for three weeks.
In conversation after conversation, the same pattern appeared. The insurance companies with the most effective claims handling were not always those with the best individual systems. They were the ones with the best relationships, combined with tools to make those partner relationships effective.
The best partners share data, escalate early and are treated as part of the claims team. Because handing a claim to a partner should never mean handing over the responsibility for the customer. In large claims especially, where a single claim can involve more than five parties, collaboration quality is the difference between a customer story and a complaint.
The same applies when you redesign a claims process. Bring all parties into the work from the start, not just your internal teams. That’s what makes it possible to work as one unit, toward the same goal.
↗ To do (after the summer of course): Map your ecosystem the same way you would map your claims process. Where are your weakest links today? Which partners do you feel aren’t working toward the same goal, and what can you do about it? Invest in these partnerships and find tools that make collaboration smooth and easy for all parties.
2. Your FNOL is only as good as your first question
The future of claims will be partly powered by AI. For some insurers it already is: filing a claim with an AI-assisted First Notice of Loss (FNOL) is reality today. But as my colleague put it on stage at Insurance Innovators (one of Europe’s largest insurance conferences) this spring: “If you ask for shitty data, you’ll get shitty results.” Laughter spread through the room. Many in the audience recognized their own claims process.
At Upptec we have seen a lot of FNOLs, and the pattern is remarkably consistent. We ask for low-quality data and then expect high-quality insights. Long forms full of questions that will never be used in the claims handling process are a waste of the policyholder’s time. And then we’re surprised the automation rate is stuck.
To be clear: the problem was never the form itself. A customer writing “my Samsung phone broke” is excellent data, if a system reads it and, with the help of AI, turns it into structure. The problem is collecting answers that nothing and no one acts on.
So ask the right question first and follow up with only the ones you actually need. Let AI do the structuring instead of the long form. You save the policyholder time while still collecting the right information, and you remove a lot of ping-ponging between claims handler and policyholder along the way. I can almost guarantee that your average claim time will drop.
↗ Make a test: File a claim in your own flow. For every question, ask two things: can the customer actually answer it, and do you as an insurer actually act on the answer? Even if only one of these fails, you’ve found wasted time for the policyholder and the claims handler.
3. Dare to think big
Many of the claims processes I encountered were designed in another era. We can think and build much faster now. Gather the team, book a workshop and allow yourselves to think big. Then take small steps and test your way forward. Big vision, small experiments. That combination is what we’ve seen actually move organizations.
One insurer we met this spring is proof of that. They came to us knowing exactly which flow they wanted to change and why, and their claims flow was built on integrations from the start. So the idea didn’t wait for a year-long IT roadmap. It got connected, tested live and evaluated within weeks. Thinking big doesn’t have to mean building big. Sometimes it means knowing precisely what you want and finding the right partners and tools to make it reality.
This is how we like to work at Upptec too. We build together with insurers who dare to try, through live experiments in real claims flows. Right now we’re doing exactly that with Folksam, taking on jewelry and third-party valuation, two of the categories that have resisted automation the longest. That’s where we want to be: where the friction is.
↗ What you can do: Take inspiration from other industries and see what others are building. Pick one claims flow and ask what it would look like if you designed it from scratch today. Then find the smallest experiment that takes you one step in that direction.
To summarize
The claims organizations that will be leading the way this fall won’t be the ones with the most impressive presentation materials. They will be the ones that rethought a process, brought their partners on board and dared to take a few more risks.
So enjoy the summer and recharge your batteries. And when someone says, “We’ll get to that after the summer”, then you’ll know what to do. If you’d like a sparring partner along the way, whether you’re rethinking your claims experience or planning your next transformation project, don’t hesitate to give us a call.
What’s next at Upptec?
Only fair that we answer our own question too. The next step for us is to truly complete coverage within content claims, including the categories that have always resisted automation and created hassle in claims. We will focus on jewelry and complex objects: high values, poor data and a reliable source of friction in the claims process. This will be an innovation project together with Folksam, one of Sweden’s largest insurers. You can learn more about the project here.
We’re also making claims data more efficient. This fall we’re developing the first version of our data views: benchmarks and insights that help insurers understand their claims portfolio. We’re also building workflows adapted to claim type, making it easier to get an overview, make the right decisions and handle claims more efficiently in Upptec.
AI has also changed how we build. Agents now carry a real share of our development work, which means ideas move from customer conversation to production faster than ever.
