Underwriting Fraud in Insurance
Fraud is a major issue for most insurance companies. In spite of the fact that measuring fraud inevitably leads to troublesome issues, the Insurance Bureau of Canada gauges the cost of insurance fraud to the Canadian economy to be more than a billion dollars a year. What’s more, the insurance industry gauges that 15% of what consumers pay for insurance accounts for false insurance claims alone.
To combat this issue, the current focus of most insurance companies has been on identifying and avoiding claims fraud, however a critical sum of insurance fraud is related to underwriting fraud.
What is Underwriting Fraud in Insurance?
Underwriting fraud happens when somebody intentionally conceals or distorts information at any stage of the policy life cycle when getting insurance coverage. It influences most lines of trade, particularly commercial auto insurance, workers’ compensation, property, and indeed life insurance. As perpetrators of fraud are getting to be more advanced, the need to be proactive and distinguish fraud before the policy is issued as part of the underwriting process has never been more critical. However, the call for a more prominent focus on underwriting fraud still lacks when compared to other types of fraud.
Places to look for underwriting fraud risk
Application fraud
Insurance carriers are competing for a business like never before, with customers requesting more choices, such as the capacity to get quotes, buy and oversee policies directly, including through mobile devices. Competition and mobility have come about in insurance companies actualizing “straight-through underwriting processing” ventures that restrain the sum of due diligence undertaken before a policy is composed.
Application fraud runs the array – applicants can withhold individual data such as social insurance numbers, maiden names, or prior addresses to avoid looking for past claims or credit histories. Also, regular customers are becoming a lot savvier in their understanding of how to effectively cheat when applying for insurance, as increasingly applicants distort details to decrease rates. Numerous individuals think that insurance fraud could be a victimless crime, but the reality is that customers are casualties. Insurance fraud has a direct impact on the sum everybody pays for health, auto, homeowners, and life insurance. Typical rate falsification procedures incorporate the following
Fronting
Where a parent states that he or she is the essential driver of a vehicle, rather than the child, to decrease the premium;
Garage flipping
Changing the address where the vehicle is most utilized, such as someone with two homes using a country address rather than a city address, where the car is really stored and utilized;
Manipulation
pre-fill tools and analytics to show fraudulent conduct. Through application pre-fill technology, with little information as a phone number, policy-level data can be populated. This incorporates location, coverage limits and deductibles, current in-force details, and payment and lapse information.
Data Misrepresentation
The most prevalent form of underwriting fraud is a misrepresentation of data or rate evasion. It is the most undetected one, too. Data misrepresentation is characterized as intentional covering up or misrepresentation of a material fact, whether it is an undisclosed driver on a car insurance application or not reporting a history of smoking for life insurance.
To curb Data misrepresentation, it is critical to address the issue in real-time all through the quotation process. Insurers must guarantee that information is correct at the point of sale and proceed to update information through the life of the policy. Exact information and data are key because it is the basis for finding transactions that show rate evasion.
To combat data misrepresentation, insurance companies are utilizing advanced analytics to form a premium leakage predictive model that right away scores applications for relative risk to predict the probability of fraud. Numerous organizations have implemented an enterprise data warehouse in order to aggregate data and possibly discover interrelated information and transactions.
Beware of the ghost broker
Another developing trend, known as ghost brokering, is slowly gaining traction. A ghost broker will offer essentially cheaper insurance rates than a legitimate insurance broker by changing key points of interest of the policy to guarantee the insured pays lower premiums.
More frequently, the ghost broker applies for genuine insurance and modifies particular details, changing anything that might have a negative effect on the quote, counting residency status or claims history.
In a few cases, the broker takes out a policy and then cancels it once the insurance certificate has been issued, leaving the client uninsured and holding a policy that’s not worth much.
Data analytics is utilized to see triggers or characteristics of an application that suggest ghost brokering is taking place. It can be done by conveying statistical analysis and cross-referencing data, such as date of birth, driver’s license data, and past histories of activities with industry databases to search for misrepresentation.
Conclusion
Traditional underwriting works utilizing rule-based models that create various “red flags” amid the underwriting process to show the need for additional research or follow-up. This model, for the most part, depends on the judgment and expertise of the underwriters alone.
Combine this with the fact that insurers are pressured to cut costs, perhaps taking off small time to verify the completeness and quality of the application data, and that it may be a highly competitive market where the primary requirements for a customer to select an insurer are often cost-based. The net effect is an environment ripe for underwriting fraud.
To guarantee rating integrity and to prevent premium leakage, insurers have to implement analytics technologies and conduct modern data analysis in real-time. Precise detection can only be realized through the creation of an overall picture of the likelihood of fraud so that action can be taken amid the underwriting process.
As today’s insurers seek to create unused strategies for employing advanced technology to detect and prevent the different sorts of underwriting fraud, capturing client information in real-time, utilizing predictive modeling, creating special investigative units, and integrating insurance data warehouses need to be among the methods employed.