Drone Usage in Insurance is Taking Off, Can Your Platform Support It?

To see one of the latest innovations in insurance technology, you might want to turn your gaze upwards, towards the skies. Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), more commonly known as drones, offer insurers a faster and more accurate way of analyzing data with minimal human risk. Several insurers have already experimented successfully with drones in risk assessment and claims settlement.

An interesting statistic is that the insurance industry in the United States accounts for around 17 percent of all commercial drone usage. — Source FAA

In today’s climate where the focus is on minimal human intervention, this number is projected to increase significantly. However, while drones in insurance can undoubtedly reduce costs in the long term, they do require a substantial investment in the short term. This is not just in terms of the cost of home inspection drone technology, but also the time and effort required to switch from traditional claims inspection and to train staff on the change. The biggest consideration though is whether existing insurance platforms can support integration with solutions provided by external partners in an open ecosystem.

What is an insurance ecosystem?

An ecosystem in the realm of insurance specifically refers to an integrated experience resulting from multiple providers working together in an interconnected system. This network of players may be either from inside the industry or out but each brings a specific capability. The power of such a system is defined by its complementary nature. In such an ‘open insurance’ model, none of the players can by themselves operate all aspects of the solution but by coming together they create an ecosystem that is more valuable than each player on their own.

Drone usage is a good example of such an open insurance ecosystem. Most insurance carriers using a drone strategy are bringing in outsourced drone solutions and integrating them with their in-house claims and underwriting solutions.

Since drones require less manpower on the ground, they are a cheaper alternative to on-site inspections. This means that adjusters can spend more time on qualitative analysis and decision-making rather than on data collection.

By some estimations, drones can collect data 10 times faster than traditional methods and can result in a 40 percent increased efficiency.

While drones are increasingly becoming popular among insurance carriers for their immense ability to collect real-time imagery, a manual operation can only go so far. Automated drone flights along with AII and analytics software are helping digitize the entire claims process. It is important to bring in a caveat here, while intelligent software will help to quickly provide data insights, skilled adjusters will be needed to interpret and act on the data.

Can your insurance platform support drones?

Making the shift from traditional assessment and claims processes to drone technology can be a drastic change. Drones operate within the largest insurance ecosystem. The success of the ecosystem depends upon how in sync all the integration solutions and platforms are. In the context of drone technology, footage from drones needs to be combined with mobile platforms that enable remote control over them, AI technology that can interpret footage, and a cloud-based system to host it in. Therefore, before including drones in your claims inspection process, you need to ensure that your existing platform has these technological capabilities. All the different cogs in the solution will need to talk to each other through the medium of application programming interfaces or APIs. Does your insurance platform support APIs?

Software requirements for drone integration?

All about that in the original article;

Originally published at https://www.simplesolve.com on February 24, 2022.