Media discontinuities between insurer and reinsurer are bridged, which ultimately benefits the policyholder. In order to identify exclusions in contracts, check people for health risks or save claims in a structured way, documents (paper, scans and e-mail) used to be read, checked and typed out manually. Thanks to the cooperation with the software company Helm & Nagel GmbH and its artificial intelligence called "Confucio", the incoming data is digitally mapped and automatically processed.
The technology processes documents using a combination of OCR, computer vision and natural language processing, making the content understandable to machines. The German Re thus understands the content of inquiries, claims notifications and reinsurance contracts with the Cognitive Automation solution Confucio. The neural networks of Helm & Nagel GmbH have already learned thousands of times how to understand texts like a human being. These so-called pre-trained models enable Deutsche Rück to train its own AI with a medium double-digit number of documents.
An insured person's medical history may include various surgery reports, doctor's letters, and test results. The AI never tires of understanding the correspondence, neither in the underwriting nor in the benefit review. This gives the insurer's reviewers structured access to the medical history, which greatly simplifies their work with the documents. The patient file is first categorized by the software in terms of content, so that surgery reports, doctors' letters and test results can be sorted in terms of content and time. Then, individual information relevant to the test is read out. In this process, an accuracy of up to 90 % could be achieved for new documents. From individual information such as weight, age and height, the BMI can then be calculated as one of the key figures to be analyzed and viewed over time.
"The health check for occupational disability insurance applications is a process that entails a great deal of uncertainty for the customer, especially due to complex questions", says Stefan Wittmann (Head of Customer Service Life/Health Deutsche Rück). "We want to take this uncertainty away from the customer by automatically reading out the relevant information from submitted documents. This means that only a few specific queries need to be answered. The customer feels more secure and has a good feeling when concluding the deal.", Wittmann continues.
The department trains the AI independently and then processes documents fully automatically - without any programming. But experienced computer scientists and data scientists can also run their own models directly on the platform. Deutsche Rück is steadily extending its digitalization lead by training customized AI within a few days. Primary insurers benefit from new customer services combined with standardization and automation of business processes. This in turn enables them to process inquiries more quickly and achieve higher customer satisfaction.
Christopher helmet, founder and managing director of Helm & Nagel: "The real added value of artificial intelligence is that Confucio learns independently and continuously improves through human feedback. This makes it sustainably possible to understand and process content in texts, even if the format or wording changes over time."
About the German Reinsurance
Deutsche Rück began offering reinsurance cover to German public insurers nearly 70 years ago. In 2009, the business area was extended to Europe. In the meantime, the Deutsche Rück Group, which also includes Zurich-based DR Swiss, writes reinsurance throughout the European market and in selected international markets. In its home market of Germany, Deutsche Rück now occupies a leading position. The rating agency Standard & Poor's regularly awards Deutsche Rück an "A+" rating, confirming its long-term stable creditworthiness and consistent underwriting policy.
About helmet and nail
Helm & Nagel GmbH automates the processing of unstructured data with the help of an artificial intelligence called Confucio. With the development and operation of learning systems, the company has won the trust of international corporations since its founding in 2016. Konfuzio understands and validates information of a wide variety of documents with precision and turns to humans for discrepancies, based on individual specifications. Standardization of data across all formats and automatic conversion of diverse inputs into clean, structured outputs is thus achieved.
Confucio goes beyond partial automation of processes and provides end-to-end automation. The AI platform is designed for integration. With the help of APIs, Confucio can be easily inserted into any workflow.