Headquartered in Radner, Pennsylvania, Lincoln Financial Group (LFG) is a US financial services company that provides life insurance, pensions, retirement planning, and group protection. The company operates multiple offices nationwide and employs more than 10,000 people as of 2024. For the year ended December 31, 2024, Lincoln Financial reported annual revenues and over $3 billion in annual revenues due to strong business performance in Group Protection and Pensions.
The company has made AI the center of its business transformation programme and pursues a range of initiatives in claims, cybersecurity and customer experience. One important project is our continued partnership with EvolutionIQ. This is an AI platform that helps experts target efforts against the best disability and group protection cases. We also expanded collaborations with technology leaders such as Workday to help manage AI-driven benefits.
This article discusses two business use cases for AI in LFG.
- Guidance to promote profitability in AI-driven claims insurance: Use machine learning to streamline claim triage, reduce management inefficiencies, and increase claimant satisfaction.
- Personalized outreach to promote sales: Personalized, compliant outreach to drive higher engagement and conversions.
Guidance to promote profitability in AI-driven claims insurance
Financial services and insurance companies face enormous operating costs due to increased volume of claims and administrative complexity. A Stanford University study estimates that US workers and employers spend around $21.6 billion a year on health insurance bureaucracy, including tasks such as triage, documentation, compliance and dispute resolution, highlighting the magnitude of inefficiency that also affects other insurance sectors.
In Canada's Public Sector Group Disability Insurance, employers paid $455 million in benefits in 2023, supporting 12,694 ongoing claims and experienced a new claim notification of 6% year-on-year. This rapid growth indicates an increase in financial and operational tensions placed on organizations due to increased billing volumes and administrative demand.
Billions are spent every year across the group and the disability insurance sector. Even modest inefficiency leads to massive losses. Recognizing these challenges, LFG has sought to transform its group protection business by increasing efficiency and focusing more on customer needs. According to a press release issued by the company, LFG partnered with EvolutionIQ, an AI-driven billing guidance provider, to pilot the solution in its long-term disability segment.
At the event, EvolutioniQ's COO and co-founder Michael Saltzman shared that the platform insists on using machine learning to analyze both historical and real-time claim data, prioritizing the most practical cases and recommending the next step for claims examiners.
He also explained how EvolutionIQ's AI-driven claims guidance platform works and analyzed both unstructured claims data, including medical notes, examiner comments and legal records. The platform utilizes advanced machine learning and natural language processing to identify underlying patterns and predict claim recovery trajectories with accuracy of up to 95%.
The press release argues that results are quick and important. Following the success of the pilot, LFG expanded its EvolutionIQ across group protection claims, reporting a claimant satisfaction of 91% in 2023.
Based on Lincoln Financial Group's financial reports in 2023 and early 2024, we have integrated our partnership AI claims guidance with EvolutionIQ into our group protection business, producing the following business results:
- Sustainable growth In group protection segments
- Margin Expansion Over 400 basis points compared to the previous year, reaching 5.5% in 2023
- Operating profit has more than doubledIt reached $107 million in the fourth quarter of 2024.
- Further margin expansion 430 basis points in the fourth quarter of 2024, reaching 8.4%
Personalized outreach to promote sales victory
If the technology and the enablement system are not fully integrated, sales teams are suffering from great pain. According to findings reported by Bain & Company from a commercial excellence case study, sellers typically spend less than 25% of their customers and time due to the ineffectiveness of the sales process and legacy technology.
According to a case study published by the vendor, LFG faces key challenges in modernizing the technology stack for sales realization. Traditional systems lacked the practical data needed to effectively deliver the right messages at the right time.
Wholesalers struggled with engagement insights, influenced financial professionals and influenced their ability to drive product adoption. The onset of the Covid-19 pandemic has exacerbated the challenges as daily wholesaler activities shift from face-to-face meetings to virtual interactions and require new approaches to organizing and personalizing outreach.
LFG partnered with Seismic to provide personalized, compliant product communications at scale, seamlessly adapting to wholesaler workflows.
According to the product website, the workflow for this product is as follows:
- Personalize and distribute content: Wholesalers use Seismic's customizable email templates to send compliant, personalized product information to financial professionals. AI guides selection and distribution by ensuring that content is shared in accordance with appropriate state and federal regulations.
- Integration with CRM: Seismic integrates with Salesforce to attract contacts and leads based on reports, campaigns and account data, enabling wholesalers to efficiently target relevant audiences.
- Engagement Insights: AI-powered analytics tracks over 300,000 emails per month, with recipients tracking recipients' opening, engagement duration, and interaction patterns through Seismic's LivesEnd technology.
- Follow-up optimization: Insights help wholesalers identify the most effective times and contacts for follow-up, whether or not to increase conversion rates, through additional emails and meetings.
- Calendar Scheduling: Personalized emails include calendar links to facilitate fast and seamless meeting scheduling directly from outreach emails.
The case studies also argue that LFG has achieved 100% adoption of the seismic platform among wholesalers through strategic deployments, including ongoing promotions with key influencers, short videos, and communications from senior leaders.
Also, the case study quotes the PhilAmus referring to wholesalers who received “95%” of their business victory by sending a single simple email. Emerj's analysis is not easy to distinguish from case studies that report how colloquial this context is, or how reliable the numbers are in a business context.
