Lloyds Banking Group has embarked on an experiment with Sprout.ai to speed up and simplify claims processing and underwriting.
The challenge
Scottish Widows is part of Lloyds Banking Group, the UK’s largest digital bank and financial services group. With 10 million customers, Scottish Widows’ award‐winning product range includes workplace and individual pensions, annuities, life cover, critical illness and income protection, as well as savings and investment products.
It is committed to improving its customer experience through innovation. The experiment with Sprout.ai focuses on streamlining life and critical illness insurance claims by reducing processing times and simplifying complex medical documentation. It also aims to assist underwriters by quickly summarising extensive medical files, enhancing decision-making. The overall goal is to minimise manual effort and speed up decisions, improving customer experience and overall efficiency.
Why Sprout.ai?
Sprout.ai uses artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language processing (NLP) to quickly extract and summarise key medical information, reducing claim processing and underwriting times. This enables underwriters and claims handlers to make faster, more accurate decisions, increasing their efficiency and capacity.
Scottish Widows identified Sprout.ai as a promising potential partner through its LAUNCH 2024 innovation programme, which saw 160 applicants competing for a place. Sprout.ai was among the 23 companies selected for further exploration due to its strong alignment with LBG’s strategic goals. The experiment is focused on testing Sprout.ai’s ability to automate key aspects of claims and underwriting processes, ultimately improving efficiency and customer satisfaction.
”This experiment with Sprout.ai offers us the ability to learn just how transformative the inclusion of AI into a Protection journey can be. The team at Sprout.ai have impressed us not only with their technical knowledge of AI but their business awareness of the UK insurance market. We look forward to seeing the outputs of this exciting partnership.”
David McLeay – Senior Innovation Manager, Scottish Widows
The experiment
The experiment involves two key areas: underwriting decisioning and claims processing. For underwriting, Sprout.ai’s technology will extract relevant information from medical reports to assist with new policy assessments. In the claims process, the AI will analyse structured and handwritten medical data, aiming to accelerate decision-making and reduce settlement times.
Automating document analysis with Sprout.ai aims to reduce insurance processes delays so that customers receive faster responses. This efficiency allows handlers and underwriters to focus on more strategic tasks.
The success of the experiment will be assessed on the following:
- Speed of return of summarised medical documents
- Accuracy of document summarisation
- Clarity of document summarisation
- Ease of working
The bigger picture
As Lloyds Banking Group progresses through its five-year transformation journey, this partnership reflects a broader commitment to embracing technology that benefits customers. By working with a UK-based company like Sprout.ai, Lloyds Banking Group is not only fostering local innovation but also reinforcing its mission to support UK customers with faster and more reliable financial services.
With a shared vision of improving efficiency and customer experience, the collaboration between Lloyds Banking Group and Sprout.ai represents a significant step towards modernising the insurance industry. If the experiment proves successful, it could lead to further advancements in claims automation, benefiting thousands of customers across the UK.
“At Scottish Widows we are passionate about challenging our existing underwriting and claims processes to provide the correct decisions as quickly as possible for all our customers. This experiment with sprout.ai will help us to understand and capitalise on how advances in artificial intelligence and natural language processing can promote consistent, transparent and market leading underwriting and claims outcomes.”
David Russell – Senior Manager, Claims and Underwriting Strategy, Scottish Widows
