Insurance claims handlers must quickly assess vast amounts of loss information in order to guide complex and urgent cases to the right outcomes. Insurance claims management has also historically been a manual task – and an area of our business where the smart deployment of technology offers great potential for real improvements to boost accuracy and productivity.
With these goals in mind, Swiss Re Corporate Solutions, our corporate insurer, has turned to artificial intelligence to bring claims handling into the 21st century. A new tool, called ClaimsGenAI, was developed by Swiss Re teams working across technology and risk-protection disciplines to automate and streamline the corporate insurance claims handling process while ensuring that human experts retain control of decision-making.
Swiss Re's annual corporate insurance claims now exceed 40,000, driving a clear recognition that we needed a step change to help our professionals manage growing caseloads. In addition to addressing rising claims volumes, ClaimsGenAI also harnesses AI to reveal new data insights, identifying additional recovery opportunities with real benefits, for us and our clients.
From paper to precision
When Swiss Re Corporate Solutions claims handlers and experts from our Group Digital & Technology Organisation set out to develop ClaimsGenAI, their ambition was two-fold: to liberate incoming claims reports from manual processing, while extending analytics capabilities to unstructured data that forms the bulk of claims information.
Corporate insurance claims can be sprawling, technical, and time sensitive. A single loss incident often results in the production of hundreds or thousands of documents, including initial notices, detailed reports, and emails. The claims handler's first job is to evaluate this material quickly to understand what happened and guide the best response that fulfills an insurers' commitments to customers.
This is where the power of AI comes in: ClaimsGenAI empowers claims handlers to perform these tasks more efficiently via time-saving insurance claims automation, with the assistance of an algorithm built to identify patterns in claims documents that manual evaluations may have missed. This boosts the potential for recoveries from third parties who may be responsible for the loss event.
The benefits to Swiss Re are clear: recoveries save us money by helping us recoup our claims payments from responsible parties. Accurate claims attribution also strongly serves our clients' interests. Successful third-party recoveries mean our policyholders can recover deductibles and keep their insurance coverage from being triggered. This, in turn, can ease pressure on future premiums.
The AI behind faster, more accurate handling
Losses are an immutable reality of both life and insurance: a fierce storm sweeps over a region; a power substation catches fire during maintenance; vehicles collide. At Swiss Re Corporate Solutions, such costly events arrive in our claims department as a First Notice of Loss. We can deploy ClaimsGenAI immediately, to triage documents, scan them for useful data, and organise this information to boost claims handlers' efficiency.
As more documents arrive, ClaimsGenAI continues to evaluate them against keywords our teams have identified as indicative of corporate insurance loss scenarios that often lead to successful recoveries. The tool is built on insights from over two decades of unstructured claims data, resulting in a reliable algorithm capable of detecting potential fraud or recovery opportunities that might otherwise have flown beneath the radar.
Once flagged as a recovery opportunity, a claim can be routed to a dedicated team of professionals to examine the options. The importance of human control cannot be overstated. While ClaimsGenAI supports more productive end-to-end claims handling, the decision-making authority remains with the people overseeing it. This human-centric approach is a foundational principle of Responsible AI, a pillar of Swiss Re's innovation strategy.
ClaimsGenAI also includes a chatbot, offering quick answers on claims governance, best practices, and other common queries. This supports claims handlers in real time with accurate, accessible guidance that they can quickly understand and put to work.
The proof is in the recoveries
Since ClaimsGenAI's mid-2024 deployment, we have observed strong results. Over the first year, it generated over 1,000 alerts for potential irregularities, leading to multiple expert reviews and contributing to a fraud savings pipeline potentially worth millions of dollars. We converted a significant share of these cases into real savings by avoiding inappropriate claims.
ClaimsGenAI also identified hundreds of third-party recovery opportunities beyond those already discovered by human claims handlers, resulting in additional recoveries that had a positive impact on Swiss Re Corporate Solutions' bottom line.
This year, the tool is driving new opportunities, helping Corporate Solutions toward its full-year 2025 combined ratio target. What's more, we are now exploring ClaimsGenAI's wider potential, in other business lines where intelligently automated claims analysis could unlock similar value and ensure Swiss Re pays the right amount for the right claim.
We see ClaimsGenAI as a valuable tool to help reshape how Swiss Re manages corporate insurance claims. Combining machine intelligence with human judgement empowers our experts to prioritise, analyse, and act with greater precision. The result isn’t merely a better process; it is a smarter claims management system delivering better outcomes for us and the people and businesses we protect.
