TransUnion’s new Prefill solution can help the insurance application process become faster and easier than ever.
Prefill makes the application process easier for the consumer, as well as faster and more efficient for the provider. Using little more than the applicant’s name, it is able to generate and populate consumer information faster and more accurately than ever before, including new and diverse data sets that help develop a more fair and more accurate consumer risk profile than ever before.
While Prefill’s previous incarnation, Auto Prefill, has become a commonplace tool in the vehicle underwriting industry, Prefill is an amalgamated system that incorporates not only vehicle data, but corporate and consumer information as well — including physical location, phone number, driver’s license verification, existing insurance data, and much more. This means less work for insurers, and less waiting around for their potential clients while data is captured. In fact, Prefill is able to automatically populate between 90% and 95% of the data necessary for insurance applications without any human intervention whatsoever.
“In the insurance space alone, we have between 3,5-million and 4-million policy holders in a population of around 23-million active consumers,” says Samuel Tayengwa, senior insurance product consultant for TransUnion Africa. “And in increasingly competitive and financially uncertain times, insurers and credit providers are under immense pressure to retain and increase their market share.
“Speed of service and accuracy of information, both of which are greatly improved through Prefill, will be critical in the coming years as a business differentiator, in an age when insurers’ products themselves are more and more alike.”
Incomplete or inaccurate information is one of the insurance industry’s biggest obstacles, leading to skewed risk profiles that can negatively affect both consumer and insurer. Improving the data capturing process means that risk can be calculated on the spot, and to a more personalised level that takes individual characteristics, rather than those based on population, into account.
This translates to less risk for the business, and more fair quotes and pay-outs for their clients. As an additional advantage, the knock-on effect is more satisfied customers and fewer contested claims — vitally important figures, considering just how important word-of-mouth and consumer reviews have become to such businesses thanks to social media.
And it doesn’t end with insurance either. Retailers who provide credit, as well as financial services providers, stand to benefit greatly from a more efficient application and approval process, especially considering TransUnion’s latest CCI report, which shows a dwindling appetite for debt amongst most South Africans in the face of rising economic uncertainty.
“This is just the beginning,” says Tayengwa. “In the near future, even ID verification will be considered obsolete for approval purposes. Biometric identifiers, such as fingerprints, facial features, and voice prints will be used instead, further streamlining the process and improving data accuracy to levels that were previously unachievable.”