Artificial Intelligence at Lincoln Financial Group – Two Use Cases

Lincoln Financial Group (LFG), headquartered in Radnor, Pennsylvania, is a serious U.S. monetary companies agency providing life insurance coverage, annuities, retirement planning, and group safety. The firm operates a number of workplaces nationwide and employs over 10,000 folks as of 2024. For the 12 months ended December 31, 2024, Lincoln Financial reported annual income of $18.44 billion and internet revenue of over $3 billion, pushed by robust enterprise efficiency in group safety and annuities.

The firm has made AI central to its enterprise transformation program, pursuing a variety of initiatives in claims, cybersecurity, and buyer expertise. One key venture is its ongoing partnership with EvolutionIQ, an AI platform that helps claims professionals goal their efforts for the highest-impact incapacity and group safety instances. It has additionally expanded its collaborations with tech leaders, comparable to Workday, for AI-driven advantages administration. 

This article explores two enterprise use instances of AI at LFG:

• AI-powered claims steering to drive insurance coverage profitability: Leveraging machine studying to streamline claims triage, scale back administrative inefficiencies, and enhance claimant satisfaction. 
• Personalized outreach to drive gross sales wins: Personalized, compliant outreach to drive greater engagement and conversions.

AI-Powered Claims Guidance to Drive Insurance Profitability

Financial companies and insurance coverage corporations face huge operational prices as a consequence of rising declare volumes and administrative complexity. A study from Stanford University estimated that U.S. employees and employers spend roughly $21.6 billion yearly navigating medical health insurance paperwork, together with duties comparable to triage, documentation, compliance, and dispute decision, highlighting the size of inefficiencies that additionally have an effect on different insurance coverage sectors.

In Canada’s public sector group incapacity insurance coverage, employers paid $455 million in advantages in 2023, supporting 12,694 ongoing claims and experiencing a 6% year-over-year rise in new declare notifications. This fast progress illustrates the rising monetary and operational pressure positioned on organizations by rising declare volumes and administrative calls for.

Across the group and incapacity insurance coverage sector, billions are spent yearly; even modest inefficiencies translate into large-scale losses. Recognizing these challenges, LFG sought to remodel its Group Protection enterprise by rising effectivity and focusing extra on buyer wants. According to the press release revealed by the corporate, LFG partnered with EvolutionIQ, an AI-driven claims steering supplier, to pilot the answer in its long-term incapacity section. 

Speaking at an occasion, EvolutionIQ’s COO and co-founder, Michael Saltzman, shared that the platform claims to make the most of machine studying to research each historic and real-time claims information, prioritizing probably the most actionable instances and recommending subsequent steps for claims examiners.

He additionally defined how EvolutionIQ’s AI-driven claims steering platform works, analyzing each structured and unstructured claims information, together with medical notes, examiner feedback, and authorized data. The platform makes use of superior machine studying and pure language processing to establish underlying patterns and predict declare restoration trajectories with as much as 95% accuracy.

The press release claims the outcomes to be fast and important. Following the pilot’s success, LFG expanded EvolutionIQ throughout its group safety claims, reporting a 91% claimant satisfaction price throughout 2023.

Based on Lincoln Financial Group’s 2023 and early 2024 monetary experiences, the partnership with EvolutionIQ to combine AI claims steering into its Group Protection enterprise produced the next enterprise outcomes:

• Sustained progress within the Group Protection section
• Margin enlargement of 400+ foundation factors year-over-year, reaching 5.5% in 2023
• Operating revenue greater than doubled, reaching $107 million in This fall 2024
• Further margin enlargement of 430 foundation factors in This fall 2024, reaching 8.4%

Personalized Outreach to Drive Sales Wins

Sales groups undergo considerably when expertise and enablement methods aren’t effectively built-in. According to findings reported by Bain & Company from their business excellence case research, sellers sometimes spend lower than 25% of their time with prospects as a consequence of inefficiencies in gross sales processes and legacy expertise. 

According to a case study revealed by a vendor, LFG confronted a big problem in modernizing its expertise stack for gross sales enablement. Traditional methods lacked actionable information essential to successfully ship the correct messages to monetary professionals at the correct time. 

Wholesalers struggled with engagement insights, which impacted their capability to affect monetary professionals and drive product adoption. The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated the problem, as day-to-day wholesaler actions shifted from in-person conferences to digital interactions, necessitating a brand new method to organizing and personalizing outreach.

LFG partnered with Seismic to ship customized, compliant product communications at scale, becoming seamlessly into wholesalers’ workflows. 

According to the product website, the next is the workflow of this product:

• Content Personalization and Distribution: Wholesalers use Seismic’s customizable e mail templates to ship compliant, customized product data to monetary professionals. AI guides the choice and distribution by making certain the correct state and federal regulatory-compliant content material is shared.
• Integration with CRM: Seismic is built-in with Salesforce to tug contacts and leads based mostly on experiences, campaigns, and account information, permitting wholesalers to focus on related audiences effectively.
• Engagement Insights: AI-powered analytics monitor over 300,000 emails month-to-month, monitoring recipient opens, engagement period, and interplay patterns via Seismic’s LiveSend expertise.
• Follow-Up Optimization: Insights empower wholesalers to establish the simplest instances and contacts for follow-up, whether or not via extra emails or conferences, thereby rising conversion charges.
• Calendar Scheduling: Personalized emails embrace calendar hyperlinks, facilitating fast and seamless assembly scheduling immediately from outreach emails.

The case study additionally claims that LFG achieved 100% adoption of the Seismic platform amongst wholesalers via a strategic rollout involving key influencers, ongoing promotion by way of brief movies, and communication from senior management. 

The case research additionally quotes Phil Armas as referring to a wholesaler who obtained “95%” of their enterprise wins from sending a single, easy e mail, adopted by focused follow-ups, which dramatically improved gross sales effectivity. In Emerj’s evaluation, it isn’t simple to tell apart from the case research reporting how colloquial this context is or how dependable that determine is in a enterprise context.