Insurers focus on claims once they’re filed, but many are lost before that, at First Notice of Loss (FNOL). Here’s why automating FNOL is the fastest way to fix insurance’s non-claiming problem.
Insurers spend a lot of energy thinking about claims once they’re filed: assessing them, processing them, paying them out. Far less attention goes to the insurance claims that never get filed at all.
That’s a bigger gap than it sounds. Every year, a meaningful share of policyholders experience a loss they’re entitled to claim for and simply don’t. Not because the loss wasn’t real, and not because the policy didn’t cover it, but because starting a claim was enough friction to put them off entirely.
The very first step in that process is called First Notice of Loss, or FNOL: the moment a policyholder tells their insurer that something has happened, whether that’s a car accident, a burst geyser, or a stolen laptop. It’s meant to be a quick, simple check-in that kicks off the claim. In practice, it’s often where the whole process quietly falls apart.
That’s a non-claiming problem, and in an industry built on customer engagement and trust, it’s costing insurers more than most dashboards reveal.
People buy insurance for the moment something goes wrong. Yet when that moment arrives, a surprising number of policyholders never actually pick up the phone or open an app to report it.
Some assume the claim won’t be worth the hassle. Some aren’t sure if they’re covered and don’t want to find out the hard way. Some start the process, hit a wall, and quietly give up. Others simply don’t realise a claim is even an option for what happened to them, and never get as far as trying.
Whatever the reason, the outcome is the same: cover that was paid for goes unused, and insurers never get the chance to deliver on the one moment that actually proves their value. It’s a strange position for an industry built on customer engagement, where the product’s biggest proof point is also the moment most likely to be quietly skipped.
It’s tempting to file this under customer experience and move on. But unpursued claims have knock-on effects that reach well beyond a single bad interaction.
Retention takes a hit first. A policyholder who couldn’t get through a claim, or didn’t bother trying, is far less likely to renew. Trust erodes just as quietly: word spreads faster than any campaign can counter it when people feel insurance “never pays out anyway.” And underneath both of those sits a slower, harder to spot cost: lifetime value drops. A customer who never claims is a customer who never sees the product work, which makes them easy to lose to a competitor offering a smoother digital experience.
None of this shows up as a single dramatic failure. It shows up as churn, as flat NPS scores, and as a slow leak in the value insurers are meant to be delivering.
Here’s the part that matters most for insurers looking to fix this: most drop-off doesn’t happen mid-claim. It happens before the claim has properly begun, at FNOL.
FNOL is supposed to be simple: tell your insurer something happened. In practice, it’s often the most friction-heavy part of the entire journey. Policyholders are asked to fill in long, repetitive forms requesting information their insurer should already hold, then wait in phone queues at exactly the moment they’re least in the mood to. Along the way, there’s often genuine uncertainty about whether the loss is even covered under their policy administration terms, with no easy way to check, and little clarity on what happens next or how long it will take.
Ask a policyholder to push through all of that before their claim has even been acknowledged, and it’s not hard to see why so many never make it past this first step.
Digitising the entire claims lifecycle in one move is a significant undertaking, and for most insurers, not a realistic starting point. So the smarter move being made across the industry is narrower and more targeted: automate FNOL first.
It’s the highest-friction, highest-dropout point in the whole claims process, and the fastest stage to meaningfully improve through claims automation. Getting it right immediately changes whether a claim exists to process at all, which is exactly why FNOL automation deserves to be first in line, not an afterthought further down the digital transformation roadmap.
But automating FNOL only solves half the problem if policyholders don’t know the option exists. An improved first step that nobody’s aware of won’t shift claiming behaviour on its own. Insurers need to actively communicate the change: through onboarding, renewal communications, app prompts, and plain-language guidance on what to do and expect when something happens. The non-claiming problem is as much about awareness and confidence as it is about process, so the fix has to be explained to policyholders, not just deployed behind the scenes.
The Briisk Instant Transaction Platform (BITP) isn’t built to take a claim from first report to final payout in one sweep, and that’s not the gap it’s trying to close. What BITP does automate is the step that matters most for solving the non-claiming problem: FNOL.
Through BITP, policyholders can start a claim in a way that’s fast, guided, and doesn’t demand they already know what to expect. Insurers get a structured, digitised first notice the moment a loss is reported, instead of relying on a policyholder’s patience to get a claim into the system at all. That single change shifts the odds meaningfully: a policyholder who reports a loss in minutes, rather than abandoning the process altogether, is a policyholder who stays engaged long enough to see the rest of the claim through.
It’s a deliberately narrow piece of the claims journey to automate, and that’s exactly why it works. Fixing the point where people give up does more for claims volume, retention, and customer trust than optimising the stages most people never reach.
If your organisation is looking at where to start digitising claims, FNOL is the place to look first.
Book a demo to see how BITP handles it.
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