Insurance company achieves compliance with automated underwriting software

The challenge

Paper processes caused regulatory issues

At the time of this project, the insurance group’s underwriting team was relying on paper-based documents. While this system had worked in the past, it was preventing the company from meeting higher industry standards. This meant that the insurer could not take on new clients and grow its business.

Besides being a barrier to growth, the paper-based process also had the following drawbacks:

• limited ability to track and audit insurance binding and bundling
• time-consuming and error-prone document management
• low performance and satisfaction in the underwriting team

For these reasons, the company decided a new insurance document management system was urgently required.

The solution

Delivering insurance workflow automation

Having seen our web portal experience, the insurer contacted Influential to design a new insurance workflow solution. As the client was already familiar with SharePoint’s flexibility and security, we opted to develop the new system within SharePoint.

Our goal was to deliver a single-page application that would be suitable for non-technical users. The application would cover task management, data capture, management information, and reporting. Additional features included search functionality and archiving.

Breaking the software down further, it included six workflows to digitise the paper-based processes:

• pre-bind bundle
• post-bind bundle
• issue policy bundle
• pre-renewal bundle
• post renewal bundle
• service bundle

The components within the overall insurance document management system included:

Task management

This component used SharePoint tasks and workflow to automate the six insurance bundling processes. We set up custom email notifications to suit the company’s regulatory requirements.

Data entry

We built new data entry forms to allow staff to record data at various stages of the workflow.

Logging

We built a web service to capture events during the workflow timeline. These events were then written to the database for reference.

Database

We configured a database to store the logged events and reference data needed for management information.

Management information

We built dashboards to display KPI data related to the workflows, as well as enabling reporting on the data.

Once the build was complete, we then migrated the company’s underwriting data into the new system. We also provided in-depth software design and technical documentation.

The benefits

Underwriters equipped to grow