Insurance APIs: API Use Cases For Insurance

Insurance APIs drive digital transformation. 

Today’s landscape demands that insurance carriers are more agile and provide a seamless omnichannel experience. And insurance APIs being the key driver in unlocking these capabilities.

In this blog, we share everything you need to know about insurance APIs. 

What Are Insurance APIs?

Insurance APIs are application programming interfaces (APIs) used to connect disparate technologies used by insurance companies. 

Why Insurance APIs Are Important

IT infrastructure in insurance has traditionally relied on core systems of monolithic databases for all of the back-end information such as accounts, policies, and claims. These systems were sufficient in the past. But, today they prevent growth opportunities. This makes it difficult to communicate with other systems, partners, and end users.

Enter insurance APIs, which by definition connect disparate technologies, to:

• Increase insurers’ efficiency.
• Increase revenue.
• Provide a better customer experience.
• Grow partner channels.

Insurance API Best Practices From Open Banking

Gain insight into how APIs provide strategic advantages in the insurance industry. Download the Akana ebook – Foundations For a Digital Ecosystem: Applying Open Banking to Open X Across Industries. 

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API Use Cases in Insurance Industry

How should you use APIs in the insurance industry?

At Akana, we are proud to be trusted by some of the world’s largest insurance carriers with our API management platform to:

• Create APIs
• Secure APIs
• Manage APIs

In recent roundtable discussions with insurance customers, we saw a rise in insurance APIs in the enterprise.

In fact, many leading insurance companies have adopted an API-first strategy. Executives are pushing the use of APIs to make the overall customer experience better and drive new business.

Below are a few common themes on use cases for APIs in insurance.

Digitization of Operations

APIs enable the digitization of many insurance services.

Enabling interaction via digital channels streamlines the partner and end customer interaction with the insurers. It creates a unified experience. Insurers often sell many different types of insurance policies (for example, dental insurance in an employer-sponsored plan). And they often work with brokers rather than employers for group policies.

Processing claims digitally makes a huge difference. One insurer shared that this digitization of operations:

• Enables transactions and reduces time.
• Smooths the interactions.
• Builds a tighter relationship.

In fact, many dealers are awarding them more business because they are finding them better to do business with. Though they might be more expensive in some cases, ease of engagement increases the value.

Increased Efficiency in Claims Management

APIs increase the efficiency of claims management. 

An efficient claims management process is the most important service that one insurer we spoke to provides. Delivering a best-in-class experience is the goal. To do it, they promise to pay out insurance claims within one of the shortest durations in the industry — and they keep their promise. 

With APIs, insurance companies benefit:

• Better internal systems integration.
• Other external parties to streamline the claims management process.

This speeds up the resolution of claims.

Growing a Partner Ecosystem

APIs make it easier for current and potential partners to do business with you.

By providing APIs for public consumption and integration, new partners (brokers, agents) are able to offer your insurance options to their customer base.

On top of that, APIs are the connectors through which aggregators compile and present their data. Without APIs as part of your strategy, your company won’t even be considered by a customer who uses those sites.

Insurance carriers can also create relationships with other industries that can potentially create business value with APIs. For instance, you can partner with:

• A real estate agency to generate leads for homeowners’ insurance buyers
• An auto dealership for auto insurance leads.

First, you identify the needs of the partners. Then, identify the transactions and interactions required. Once you do that, you can supply self-service APIs to meet your partners needs. And you'll be able to scale your partner ecosystem. 

Delivering New Services

APIs help you deliver new services.

The world is advancing technologically at an incredible speed, with IoT taking over everything we touch and experience.

Many modern vehicles are now equipped with tools to call for help in the event of accident. We can pull up our insurance provider’s app and instantly upload photos of an incident for quicker claims resolution. Some auto insurance providers have devices that plug into a vehicle’s console that monitors driving behavior and adjusts policy premiums accordingly.

The key driver for all the interconnectedness between these devices and the insurance carrier are APIs.

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Explore additional resources:

• API Basics
• API ROI

Insurance APIs: Useful APIs to Check Out

Here are 12 of the most popular insurance APIs.

Drive Transformation With Insurance APIs

The best way to drive digital transformation for insurance APIs is to use an enterprise API platform, like Akana.

Akana provides the easiest way to accelerate digital transformation in the enterprise.

With Akana, you can:

• Accelerate time-to-market by deploying insurance APIs faster.
• Ensure powerful security at scale to protect your critical insurance applications and data.
• Gain a true partner in your transformation strategy. 

That's because the Akana API platform includes:

• An integrated out-of-the-box API portal and marketplace.
• An API gateway that allows you to apply security policies in a click.
• In-depth API analytics, so you can insight into your APIs.

See for yourself what sets the Akana API platform apart. Watch the on-demand demo.

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