Delivering on the promises of an industry

As the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic in March 2020, Swiss Re's global claims teams braced for the unknown. The industry had dealt with catastrophes and even pandemics before, but few anticipated the scale and duration of the then-novel SARS-CoV-2. The crisis brought into sharp relief just how critical a robust claims function is to the Life & Health insurance industry's success. It also underscored the value of digitalisation in helping manage a rising claims workload.

Swiss Re claims teams stepped up immediately to handle the growing number of claims, while navigating a rapidly changing landscape. The industry faced multiple challenges at once and many of these would have implications for those dealing with claims: Working from home at short notice; understanding contractual obligations during a pandemic; dealing with personal anxieties; explaining the financial impact for various stakeholders; and certainly not least, anticipating potential changes to the regulatory environment. 

From a continuity point of view, the immediate concern was how easy it would be to move the entire industry's claim function to a virtual environment.  At Swiss Re, we identified this as an early risk and anticipated an increase in delays to process and report claims.  This brought one of the first surprises of the pandemic: As far as we could measure, this delay never really materialized in a significant way.

Carriers quickly mobilized, enacting business disruption plans. We saw a very smooth transition from office to work from home.  Companies immediately anticipated likely disruptions to the global medical and financial infrastructure and worked with reinsurers to put in place contingencies to deal with premium and claim reporting delays.  All told, the industry did a fantastic job to keep our promises to policyholders.

The expectation was always that this was a short-term crisis situation.   As such, teams pulled out all the stops to keep up with increased volumes and, where possible, accelerated programs to make the claims process more efficient.  Here's another learning from the pandemic: We now know that this has been far from temporary and claims across the industry continue to be elevated two years after the pandemic was declared.   

Working at the coalface ultimately meant that the claims teams have had to bear the brunt of wave after wave of unprecedented levels of claims, stretching both resources and processes to their limit.  The pandemic also taught us that careful planning alone was not enough to prepare for the twists and turns that lay ahead. Agility and dedication were demanded, so our industry could continue to deliver to our clients when they needed us most.

At Swiss Re, we were driven out of necessity to develop and adopt new technology to ease the burden on the teams without sacrificing good risk management. For example, our claims triaging engine introduced in 2021 effectively integrated the art of claims adjudication with the science of claims adjudication. The machine-learning algorithm, trained on years of expert assessments, can highlight claims that needed more attention. Turning to digitalisation for this part of the process turned out to be an excellent way to optimize how we deployed our experts as cases continued to rise.

During the pandemic, we have proved that our industry can be relied on even in the face of significant volatility – both financially and operationally. Like the rest of society, our teams at Swiss Re are tracking the development of COVID-19 as it advances toward endemic disease – and looking forward to some semblance of a return to normality with the chance for the teams to recover, recharge and to take stock of the significance of the role they played in making the world more resilient.