The Challenge
Digitizing Manual Processes and Lowering Operational Expenses
This commercial specialty US P&C Insurer developed a reputation for not being afraid of insuring complex or hard-to-price risks that other insurers avoid. This unique market position coupled with a series of acquisitions accelerated growth, reaching $3.2 billion in GWP in 2021. But it also brought significant underlying operational and technological complexity, and higher expense ratios.
35 unintegrated legacy systems led to overly manual and siloed operations, which caused a lack of standardization, process duplication, growing backlogs, and errors in account reconciliations and collections, affecting cash flow. A paper-based FNOL process meant clearing new business submissions took over 24 hours, mostly undertaken by costly underwriting resources.
The Insurer was under significant cost pressure and was keen on digitizing operations and setting up a Digital Business Services (DBS) model to improve their operating efficiencies, stay market competitive, and improve the stakeholder experience.
The Outcome
End To End Digitization of Operations and Process Standardization
Sutherland adopted a transformative and holistic approach to reset their operating model, starting a lasting partnership of over 13 years and counting.
We redesigned their operating model across business lines, spanning all functions of New Business, Underwriting, Servicing, Actuarial support, Claims and FAO –and today support nearly 95% of the insurer’s outsourced business. Sutherland deployed and scaled intelligent automation across standardized and integrated processes, and set up the Automation Center of Excellence, with Sutherland Robility at its core.
Leveraging the power of Sutherland Extract, data from ACORD forms was extracted automatically, driving down entry handle times from 7 minutes to less than 2 minutes – leading to 80% faster endorsement processing. Using Sutherland SUL, all major workflows were digitalized to drive streamlined processing and tangible business outcomes, including a 72% reduction in outstanding account balances, and 75% faster claims processing, enabled by 40% of processes being zero-touch, and 30% single-touch.
