One of the ongoing challenges facing insurers is the impact of legal or legislative changes on the cost of outstanding and IBNR claims. It’s like an ongoing game insurers are forced to play where the ref has the power to move the goal even after the striker has taken their shot.
With no opportunity to adjust the past premiums that must pay for those claims, it is vitally important when such changes arise to rapidly understand the impact on outstanding reserves.
A recent example of this challenge is the completion of the Final Stage of the Damages (Return on Investment) Bill in the Northern Ireland Assembly. Expected to receive royal assent during January 2022, the bill will establish a new statutory methodology against which The Government Actuary must - within 90 days - review the discount rate to be used in the calculation of personal injury damages in Northern Ireland. Insurers and other compensators with outstanding serious personal injury exposures in Northern Ireland therefore face the potential for material change to the potential cost of those claims.
When an instance such as this arises - and to prevent being caught off-side - the requirement to quickly identify all potentially impacted claims and re-assess their expected cost is paramount. A discount rate review is just one topical example, but similar instances might involve developing case law that affects the calculation of damages or costs recoverable by claimants.
360Globalnet’s claims analysis software, 360Retrieve, can provide invaluable insight to a portfolio and how it might be exposed to changes of this type. It can ingest all the unstructured data that arrives in a business; emails, letters, image metadata, expert reports and much more – and turns 100% of that data searchable and capable of analysis. It’s playing a crucial role of ‘assistant manager’, guiding you with real-time strategy and rule changes so your defence can be as effective as possible.
Attributes present within individual claims are rendered searchable and reportable to provide a powerful insight to the ways in which the portfolio might be affected by a changing legal environment. By way of example, if damages recoverable for a specific injury type or medical condition were to be materially changed by developing case law, 360Retrieve can undertake a real-time search of all data to identify any claim where reference to that injury or condition appears.
Using the same methodology and customer-specified search criteria, 360Retrieve can deliver a wide range of management insights, from case-specific fraud detection to whole-portfolio evaluation. Not embracing these legislative changes guarantees an own goal.
If you would like to discuss how 360Retrieve could deliver analytical capability across 100% of the data in your business, get in touch today to arrange an in-person or virtual demonstration.
