Many office workers spend as much as 40 percent of their time on laborious manual activities. The Direct Bill Commissions (DBC) process is one of those manual activities for many insurance agencies, especially if they deal with multiple carriers. AI-powered Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is a technology that can reduce the manual time and effort.
Synatic’s AutoDB Commission provides the solution to manage the DBC process by recognizing text from carrier documents and automating the commission calculation process.
Agencies still rely on manual work to download commission statements, calculate commissions and update the data in their Agency Management System (AMS). With such a manually intensive process, errors can occur and the wrong data can be captured in the AMS.
DBC-related tasks are complex and time-consuming, which is one reason why many insurance agencies experience 30% of new agents quitting within three months. High staff turnover is a significant cost, making up tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in hiring and onboarding replacements.
The DBC process is an insurance process that requires manual work to review and reconcile the DBC statement data in PDF format from the carrier against the data in the agency's AMS.
It involves agency staff having to visually check statements line-by-line to identify discrepancies, resulting in the finance team spending hours processing PDF statements from carriers. Each record may take anywhere from 5 to 10 minutes to review. Then discrepancies must be emailed to producers for them to assess. Feedback is never immediate so there is a time lag before the statement can either be fixed or sent back to the carrier. It also takes time for the finance team member to update their AMS with the correct statement figures.
Medium to large agencies deal with 50-100 carriers. Only a few people are assigned to review an average of 200 carrier statements; this can take weeks to get through. Not only is this inefficient in terms of time and resources, but sometimes leads to the agency missing payroll cutoffs.
Because fixing discrepancies with DBC statements is extremely resource- and time-intensive, some agencies outsource the process to a Business Process Outsourcing service to compare statement data to AMS data, and fix discrepancies and errors if there are any. This means that agencies are spending money that could have been saved if the process was improved internally.
Any manual process has the potential to miss errors or even create them. So, if any commission calculations are inaccurate they can lead to overpayment for some producers and underpayment for others, leading to unhappy staff.
By staying with a manual DBS process, agencies are also unable to keep track of commissions accurately.
Sticking with manual processes can lead to agencies missing out on the competitive advantages offered by automating the administrative aspects of the DBC process and manually fixing discrepancies.
Not automating processes can create several problems.
OCR has had a huge impact on the insurance industry, allowing companies to convert typed or printed text into machine-readable format without needing manual input. However, the problem with traditional OCR is that it is sometimes limited in the text it can convert. AI-powered OCR is a technology that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to better recognize a wider range of fonts, images, and layouts than conventional OCR. It can extract text from documents with greater accuracy compared to traditional OCR.
Agencies that do not capitalize on the advantages presented by AI-powered OCR will have to continue using archaic methods of scanning and manually inputting statement information into the AMS.
AutoDB Commission offers a complete solution for DBC management and uses built-in AI-powered OCR technology to automatically extract information from DBC statements, such as customer name, policy number, effective date, and commission value, from a PDF document or a scanned invoice from multiple carriers.
It has pre-built and fully customizable integrations and solutions for different AMS systems.
AutoDB Commission scans the commission statement and converts and imports the data into the AMS, matching it with policies in the AMS. AI-powered OCR recognizes contextual clues within documents to identify data fields from addresses, names and even sum totals. AutoDB Commision catches records that do not match, thus reducing the number of suspense entries to be reconciled. These entries can then be fixed before posting to the AMS.
Agencies can eliminate the need to visually scan every line in a document that needs to be processed. Finance teams see all the exceptions or records that don't match the information in the AMS. This triggers a workflow to run alerting finance teams and producers of discrepancies so they can be actioned accordingly. By eliminating the back-and-forth communication between agency and producer to make sure that DBC statements are correct, it shortens the time it takes for DB Commissions to be processed.
The AutoDB Commission system’s AI-powered OCR delivers several benefits.
As the insurance industry drives towards efficiency across the ecosystem through digital transformation, it’s unsurprising that many carriers are reluctant to work with agencies that still rely on manual processes
When used together, AI-powered OCR and Synatic’s AutoDB Commission can save account managers (AMs) a significant amount of time. By automating the data capture process, AMs can enjoy better efficiencies, allowing them to focus on serving their customers and building a profitable business that carriers will be happy to partner with.
With the assurance of accurate data in the AMS, better informed business decisions can be made.
If you want to leverage the power of AI-powered OCR, contact Synatic.
