About the Customer

QBE Insurance Group is one of the world’s top insurers and reinsurers. QBE employs around 11,700 employees, with operations in 27 countries, providing insurance to policyholders in more than 140 countries.
Sollers has been working with QBE’s International Division which underwrites a range of non-life commercial lines of business, much of which is written from Lloyds of London.

About the Project

Background: QBE is modernizing its claims handling to provide a better service to its customers. It is automating or removing low-value administrative tasks in order to spend more time focusing on enhanced customer interactions. QBE is leveraging technology to process straightforward claims more quickly, reducing wasted time and allowing its customers to focus on their business. One of the key steps in this journey is to make improvements to its Claims Management System (CMS).

Problem: QBE has made great strides over the last 4 years in using robotics to automate non-value-adding activities, and wished to complement this with direct system development to automate back-end processes.

Solution: The Sollers team did a short Proof of Concept (PoC) experimenting with Work Queues and rule-based Automation. This was achieved using the Guidewire ClaimCenter workflow engine. This PoC was developed in four weeks with a team consisting of four development team members. The automation that was created resulted in an additional estimated saving of around 3.500 hours yearly when compared to just using robotics. This is time which is now being used to have better quality interactions with customers and brokers.

Since the Proof of Concept showed great results in Motor Payment Automation, QBE decided to move on with further successive automations and is implementing a range of work queue automation inside their core system. QBE is now focusing on the set-up of new claims and updating of reserves to ensure that claims go to the right person at the right time. With this iterative approach QBE is adding automations step by step and is reaping the benefits of:

• Increased customer satisfaction
• Shorter claim lifecycles
• Increased efficiency
• Improved QBE User Experience
• Robust IT solutions
• Enabled Workflow management
• Increased visibility of staff workload
• Removal of redundant activities
• Improving manual processes during development

What this project showed us:

1. Automation of administrative tasks allows claims professionals to be more customer-focused.
2. Small improvements and time-savings can ramp up to great benefits rapidly.
3. The use of Business Rules and Workflows either as part of modern Core Systems or with the use of an external BPMS and API Integration can provide additional benefits when compared to legacy RPA solutions.
4. Process Automation projects do not have to be expensive and can easily generate value surpassing the costs during ongoing developments.
5. Automation is perfectly suited for Agile Development and its iterative approach to project management.

Outlook to the future:
Due to the great results achieved in 2021 QBE has extended their automation program to the next year and is planning to further advance automation of more complex cases by the use of extended AI/ML capabilities.
Through excellent teamwork the groundwork is set, and end-to-end automations are enabled.

If you are interested to learn more about Intelligent Automation in Insurance feel free to check our Website or contact us [email protected].