As insurance verification remains an essential step in risk management for many businesses, outdated processes can hurt efficiency and lead to costly errors. When it comes time to invest in digitizing your workflow, you’ll need to decide: Do you build a homegrown system, buy an out-of-the-box software, or something in-between?
Typically, the correct decision depends on the specifics of your business needs. But in the case of insurance verification, there are a lot of benefits to getting a comprehensive solution to manage your end-to-end process.
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Understanding the Insurance Verification Landscape in 2024
The insurance verification space is evolving. While checking your customers’ coverage has traditionally been a manual process, it’s reaching a turning point.
Within the auto industry, for instance, staff members routinely reach out to insurance carriers by phone to confirm coverage before their customer drives off the lot. Between collecting the customer’s insurance card, calling the carrier, printing the policy documents, and reviewing the details, this can take anywhere from 15 to 30 minutes– with opportunities for data errors and compliance violations all along the way.
In the property rental industry, this process often doesn’t take place at all. Instead, many property managers simply collect their residents’ insurance documents. From there, they store them away, trusting that the information is accurate. While this reduces the administrative burden, it can also lead to adverse outcomes, such as fraudulent and expired policies.
More recently, some key trends are reshaping this landscape across industries.
Compliance regulations
To start, stricter compliance regulations are pushing organizations to adopt more secure verification methods. Within the auto industry, for instance, the FTC has implemented an updated Safeguards Rule to protect consumer data. The new rule imposes stricter regulations on how businesses need to handle personally identifiable information (PII), as well as protocols for responding to vulnerabilities and data breaches.
Similarly, local legislation like the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) imposes restrictions on the sale of consumer data across all industries, including property rentals.
Advancements in fraud technology
Rising instances of fraud have also sparked concerns within the auto and property industries. According to recent data, synthetic fraud exposure reached $7.9 billion in the auto industry alone. As criminals adopt more sophisticated methods, business owners are finding it increasingly difficult to weed out bad actors. This has made it a priority for many to implement more robust verification protocols.
Call center and mail delays
In the years following the pandemic, businesses of all types are experiencing a strain on their resources. As a result, call centers are seeing longer wait times, and postal offices continue to experience delays. These incremental issues are slowly weighing on the traditional insurance verification process. While this step may have taken around 15 minutes pre-pandemic, it’s now reaching closer to 30 given staffing issues and long wait times.
As companies navigate these challenges, many organizations are starting to shift toward digital verification solutions. With real-time data access and automated processes, modern solutions offer an opportunity to sidestep these growing obstacles.
Recent innovations in insurance verification
When it comes to modern insurance verification, there are two different types of solutions leading the space.
The first type automates the first step of retrieving your customer’s policy information. From there, the dealer will take over to analyze and store the insurance documents. However, to avoid the manual gap, some organizations will consider building a custom solution or integration to fill in the latter part of the process.
The second type has entered the industry more recently. With a more comprehensive offering, it allows businesses to automate the entire process from data retrieval to analysis. After pulling the most current version of the customer’s policy, it analyzes the information, then breaks it down into an easy-to-read report.
Because an all-in-one solution reduces manual lift while eliminating the need for add-on integrations, it can significantly improve productivity within under-resourced teams. And while the technology is still new, early adopters are finding major efficiency gains in leveraging it to cut out the transitions and in-between steps in their insurance verification process.
Deciding Between Build vs. Buy
With traditional insurance verification processes posing an operational bottleneck across industries, it’s time to figure out the next step. Let’s explore the benefits of buying a dedicated insurance verification platform.
Lower upfront cost
Building custom software is an expensive endeavor, especially for businesses without an in-house IT team. Even creating a simple integration can take a dedicated engineer months to complete, racking up a bill in the tens of thousands of dollars.
That’s why it’s often better to work with a tech partner to onboard an existing solution. These platforms typically offer subscription-based pricing, which means you can scale up or down as needed. This flexible cost structure can be a game-changer, allowing you to start with a small investment before making a major commitment.
Faster implementation
When you implement an out-of-the-box solution, you can get up and running in a fraction of the time it would take you for a custom build. In many cases, modern software is available in a matter of weeks. This allows your organization to start realizing the benefits of a modernized verification process quickly, without the drain on IT resources required for an in-house solution.
Additionally, because there’s a dedicated team behind the software, it often comes with built-in maintenance and feature enhancements. That means that you don’t need to worry about scrambling to respond when one of your platforms gets an update that breaks your entire tech stack.
Built-in security and compliance
Robust security and data protection measures can be difficult to implement in a homegrown solution. But these components are definitely not optional, especially in the face of recent regulations.
In the updated Safeguards Rule, the FTC highlights the requirement for enhanced data security features, including encryption and multi-factor authentication. By leveraging a comprehensive insurance verification platform from a reliable tech partner, you can offload this burden and focus your team’s efforts on core business objectives.
How Modives Streamlines Insurance Verification with Out-of-the-Box Solutions
Creating an end-to-end solution for the insurance verification process gets very complicated very quickly. There are thousands of insurance companies across a multitude of industries, and coverage types vary widely within each space. Additionally, each state and business has its own requirements for coverage of drivers and property renters. With so many scenarios and edge cases to navigate, many tech providers opt to leave that step to humans.
At Modives, we’ve been working on filling this gap, starting with the auto and property spaces. Our award-winning solutions CheckMy Driver and CheckMy Resident automate verification for dealerships, lenders, property managers, and more. By combining our team’s decades of insurance experience with feedback from industry players, we’ve built a platform designed to handle business use cases that come up everyday.
In unifying the entire insurance verification experience, these applications offer many benefits to your business.
Low-touch set-up
Setting up your verification system with Modives doesn’t require an entire tech team, or even a dedicated software engineer. We connect quickly and easily with any DMS, PMS, or CRM. Or, if you don’t want to integrate with an existing system, we can also provide actionable information directly through our standalone web-based application.
Actionable insights
Whereas some insurance verification applications work by surfacing carrier-created policy documents, our system goes a step further to return intuitive results built for your business. Our AI-driven analytics engine analyzes policy information against both state- and company-specific requirements, making sure that coverage meets your needs without the need for in-depth analysis on your end.
Security compliance
The updated FTC Safeguards Rule outlines that businesses are responsible for the security practices of their vendors. Instead of managing compliance across several solutions, you can use CheckMy Driver or CheckMy Resident to ensure data security across your entire end-to-end process.
Modives solutions are backed by SOC 2 Type II certification– a comprehensive security compliance standard that evaluates an organization’s internal controls for protecting customer data over an extended period. With advanced security features like MFA and encryption, you can ensure that your customers’ data is managed responsibly.
Continuous enhancements
When you partner with Modives, you get a solution that evolves with your business rather than building one that needs to be constantly updated. Both CheckMy Resident and CheckMy Driver integrate third-party technologies and evolve to meet business requirements at a staggering pace. If you wanted to do the same with a custom solution, it would require additional development work to plug into another API.
Streamline Your Insurance Verification Process
Ready to onboard a solution to automate your end-to-end insurance verification process? Learn more about CheckMy Resident and CheckMy Driver, or reach out and connect with our team.
