Claims 2021 Planning: Making Good Bets

In most insurance companies, it is time to take out the 2020 budget and see where line items need to move for next year. Did the claims organization meet objectives? If not, what adjustments need to be made?

What technology partners were aligned with the organization at the beginning of the year? And how do those initiatives need to be moved forward?

It sounds like a reasonable place to kick off from, right? Actually, the answer is probably “no.” If 2020 claims plans are the baseline for 2021, I conjecture that this is the wrong place to start.

SMA’s recently released report, Claims Transformation Reset: The Impact of COVID-19, lays out the case for why claims transformation and claims operations have a new performance baseline because of COVID-19. In most cases, many things changed, such as work-from-home (WFH) practices and interactions with customers that are no longer being done face-to-face.

The pandemic’s impact is generally part of everyone’s view, but it is still evolving daily.