The concept of Straight-Through Processing (STP) has been around in the financial services market since the '90s. The idea is to reduce the need for human intervention and create fully automated business workflows that speed up transactions. Thanks to improvements in software tools and artificial intelligence, STP can now be effectively applied to insurance claims.

STP enables carriers to be responsive, it reduces the risk of errors, drives down costs, and results in much swifter claims processing, which is good for customers and carriers. It was automation coupled with artificial intelligence (AI) that enabled start-up insurer, Lemonade, to process a claim in just three seconds earlier this year. Let's take a closer look at some of the problems STP can address.

The problem with manual processing

Carriers are under pressure to reduce costs, but manual claims processing is time-consuming, labor intensive, and fraught with the risk of error. There are bottlenecks that slow progress down, hand-offs between siloes, and disparate systems and databases to search and collate. A single policy might necessitate data exchanges from multiple agencies, carriers, and other third-parties. Due to incompatibilities between IT systems and siloes, that data is often manually re-keyed.