Restore Records Management claims data mining mitigates fraud

In just two months, the City of London Police investigated over £200,000 fraudulent claims.

In the face of a rising tide of fraudulent claims, insurers can leverage their existing physical data to detect and prevent fraud, according to a records management expert. As the cost-of-living crisis continues, opportunistic claims have surged, prompting concerns among industry professionals.

By employing optical character recognition (OCR) and AI technology, insurers can digitally analyse thousands of claims to uncover patterns and similarities. For example, they can identify multiple claims with different names linked to the same mobile number or email address.

Steve Holmes, a representative from Restore Records Management, explained that their subsidiary, Restore Digital, employs OCR to extract data from insurance records, transforming them into searchable PDFs. This data can then be analysed using machine learning and AI algorithms to identify document commonalities.

According to Restore Records Management, insurers detected 89,000 fraudulent claims worth £1.1bn in 2021 alone, but it is estimated that a significant amount of fraud still goes undetected each year. Early identification of false claims is crucial for policy providers to mitigate costs.

Many insurance companies outsource records management services to improve file retrieval speed, enhance compliance, and save space and time. However, Restore Records Management believe that the potential for using this data to combat fraud is often overlooked

One of their case studies highlighted the effectiveness of data mining in fraud detection.

Restore Records Management assisted an insurance company grappling with numerous motor claims by searching for potential fraud connections. They discovered 30 claims attributed to the same person under different guises, leading to legal action and saving the insurer money.

Steve emphasized that this “hidden benefit of outsourcing physical data storage” is “often underestimated”, urging firms to seize the opportunity to unlock valuable data rather than relegating physical records to forgotten boxes.