The ROI of Automated OSINT, Part I: Insurance Fraud & Claims Investigations

Insurance companies are built on their margins. They must balance risk and losses against revenue in order to hit their business goals while serving their customers. That’s why achieving positive returns on their investments is so critical for success. 

Automated open-source intelligence (OSINT) tools are invaluable for insurance companies looking to maximize impact with their current resources. However, it can be tough for end users to concretely demonstrate dollar value to their colleagues. After all, they’re busy enough performing their jobs as investigators. So, how do we measure the true value of an OSINT solution? How do we demonstrate the cost of not investing in such a tool? While every company is different, let’s see what kind of ROI insurance companies can realistically attain with the right technology in place. 

What is ROI and Why Does it Matter?

To start, ROI stands for Return on Investment. When an organization spends money on personnel or tools, they typically expect that investment to return more money than their initial expenditure. Insurance company decision-makers want to know if the funds allocated toward OSINT tools will help their SIU teams work more efficiently and drive a larger reduction in losses or incidents.

Real-World Examples: Insurance Carrier

Let’s illustrate how to calculate the ROI of automating OSINT workflows with an example. In this scenario, an insurance company has an SIU team of five that can investigate up to 600 claims a year. This works out to 10 investigations per head per month. Each investigation takes an average of 3.5 hours when using manual processes or only 15 minutes with automated ones. Now, let’s drill down into the numbers to capture what that might cost and how those costs can be reduced with automation.

Manual Internet Investigations:

• Estimated hourly cost of experienced SIU investigator, including BLS-estimated salary, benefits, and other costs: $51.45
• Total SIU team time spent on OSINT per year: 2,100 hours (600 claims × 3.5 hours)
• Annual cost of SIU team hours spent on OSINT: $108,045 (2,100 hours × $51.45 per hour)

Internet Investigations with Automated Tool:

• Estimated hourly cost of experienced SIU investigator: $51.45
• Total SIU team time spent on OSINT per year: 150 hours (600 claims x 15 minutes)
• Annual cost of SIU team hours spent on OSINT: $7,717.50 (150 hours x $51.45 per hour)

Predicted Savings with Automation:

• Annual SIU team time freed up for other tasks: 1,950 hours or almost 244 working days (2,100 hours spent with manual processes - 150 hours spent with automated tools)
• Value of time saved: $100,327.50 (1,950 hours x $51.45 per hour)

Predicted ROI With Automation:

Let’s say the automated OSINT solution costs $45,000 annually. To calculate the company’s ROI, they would multiply the hours saved on OSINT by the average hourly cost of time spent on other tasks, subtract the price of the tool, and divide the result by the price of the tool. Depending on how the company values those hours, that company could achieve a 5-10x return on investment ((1,950 x hourly labor value) - $45,000) / $45,000) by working on other initiatives for the business, including introducing additional fraud controls.

What This Means for SIU Teams

As illustrated above, a team of five could spend more time on other critical tasks, or they could potentially handle many more cases instead. If each team member spends the same amount of time on OSINT with the automated platform instead of manual techniques, capacity would increase to 8,400 cases per year  (2,100 hours / 15 minutes per case). This represents a 1,300% increase in case handling capacity without increasing headcount, helping the carrier further clamp down on fraud. If the insurer reinvested all of the time saved into investigations, its ROI on the OSINT automation tool would reach 3,021% or 30x.

See the Results for Yourself

Guided by the example above, you can calculate how much time and money your team is spending on their OSINT workflows. How long are your investigations taking? And how many more could you complete if that time was reduced while maintaining or even enhancing overall accuracy? 

No matter what process your team currently relies on, they could do more with an automated one. With industry-leading data sources and AI-driven automation, Skopenow helps SIUs make the most of their time and money. Want to see how? Come schedule a demo. 

Join over 1,500 organizations, including 10 of the top 20 insurance carriers, that rely on Skopenow's automated OSINT platform to automatically collect and process relevant publicly available information, make better decisions, and reduce fraud. Learn more and schedule a personalized demo today at www.skopenow.com/try.