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Paring Costs From Printing
Even as digital communication becomes more prevalent, the case for
investing in new print technologies remains strong for insurers.

Seemingly no matter how far the insurance industry moves into the digital age, it still heavily relies on printed forms to communicate. Insurance Networking News asked Francis McMahon, VP of Marketing for Trumbull, Conn.-based Océ North America Production Printing Systems, about how insurers can leverage new printing innovations to cut costs.

channel. But they should also be using it to deliver the maximum value as well. These documents don’t just provide evidence of a transaction. Furnishing customers with new insurance cards, EOBs or policies offers a valuable opportunity to reinforce the company’s commitment to the customer, promote the brand and cross-sell.

INN: As the Web becomes an increasingly popular delivery channel, are insurers missing opportunities to extract costs from their print operations?

FM: The insurance industry is such a document-intensive business. You don’t buy a box of insurance or configure an insurance system—paper is the physical manifestation of something policyholders place a high value on. So, printed communications have historically been an important component of engaging customers and agents and solidifying customer relationships.

While all types of insurance firms are insisting that agents move away from paper and are offering incentives for customers to go paperless, overall print suppression rates across insurance businesses still hover in the 5% to 7% range. This means that paper is the main channel for more than 90% of customer communications.

Insurers should be looking for opportunities to extract costs from this

INN: How can developments in printing technology help insurers cut costs?

FM: As insurers wrestle with issues such as consolidation, competition and compliance, they need to produce documents in the most efficient, cost-effective way possible. Digital technology, it turns out, is a great enabler of both cost efficiency and marketing effectiveness.

From a hardware standpoint, the latest innovation is inkjet technology, which enables a sophisticated white-pa-per-in, finished-product-out process. Instead of producing preprinted paper stock or forms and adding variable data and printing checks on dedicated magnetic ink character recognition (MICR) printers, insurers can produce full-color documents and checks with security features on a single platform using plain white paper.

Until recently, this type of solution
could only be delivered on toner-based
printers. Now, with the availability of
high-speed inkjet products and the fall-
ing cost of ink, there are operational
advantages for companies that have the
volume to drive economies of scale. In
essence, inkjet machines typically cost
more to acquire, but are less expensive
to operate so the companies that save
the most money are the ones who print
the most volume on each device.