Sponsored content: Craig Stack, founder and president at Truepic, discusses the importance of authentic input to creating real efficiency
Every major insurer in the UK is chasing the same goal – more claims settled faster, with less human intervention. Straight through processing (STP) has become the industry’s north star and with good reason. The efficiency gains are real.
Automated workflows can reduce cost per claim by 20 to 30 percent within six months and, in mature deployments, the savings go further still.
The ambition to automate 60 percent of straightforward claims within the next 18 months is not unrealistic.
The industry is clearly racing to apply artificial intelligence (AI) to achieve these goals.
Carriers are layering in triage tools, upgrading estimation platforms and refining decisioning engines. These are powerful investments and the right ones to make. But they are not sufficient on their own.
For every pound spent on AI downstream, the industry needs to be asking whether the evidence feeding those systems can actually be trusted.
Consistent results
When a policyholder is asked to photograph damage, the results are predictably inconsistent. Wrong angles, poor lighting, missing context and files with no record of when or where they were taken.
But incomplete submissions are only part of the problem. Images that can’t be verified are inherently unreliable – a photo may have been taken days before or after the loss, pulled from the internet or generated entirely by AI.
Without verification at the moment of capture, there is no way to know. Each submission that raises doubt exits the automated pathway and lands in an adjuster’s queue. STP targets slip. Cost per claim rises.
Fixing this does not mean adding more AI further down the chain. It means building verification into the start of the process.
That looks like clear guidance to customers on exactly what to photograph and from which angle, with submissions checked against those requirements before they are accepted.
More fundamentally, it means the image is tested, authenticated and carries a verifiable record of when and where it was taken – confirmed at capture – and locked so it cannot be altered after the fact. A photograph with that kind of provenance is not just an image. It is evidence a claims system can act on.
When that is in place, the difference is immediate. Authenticated and guided inspections take minutes. Submissions arrive complete and trustworthy and move straight through to settlement.
That is what STP is supposed to look like. Zurich’s chief claims officer recently noted that the sector has yet to feel the full impact of rapid AI deployment in claims – and should expect to.
He is right. But the risk cuts both ways. If the evidence going in cannot be trusted, the decisions coming out cannot be trusted either.
The carriers hitting their STP targets aren’t just deploying better AI. They’re getting the front door right. Some are already there. The tools exist.
The question is whether the rest of the industry treats intake as seriously as it treats everything that comes after it.
