Powering Up the Efficiency of an Underwriting Business With Multi-Cloud Technology Implementation

Business Overview

ASU is a well-established underwriting company that works to bridge the gap between insurance takers and providers by offering comprehensive underwriting services for claims and insurance purchases. The company did not have any existing portals or Salesforce, so our team helped set up a Salesforce System for ASU, including the setup of all insurance products and portals to handle all broker, client, and carrier activities.

Challenges:

• Inefficient Broker-Driven Insurance Management:

As a crop and property insurance provider, the client’s business operations heavily relied on brokers who managed key functions such as onboarding, adding insurance details, and overseeing customer policies. However, using disparate systems created challenges in streamlining these processes, resulting in onboarding, task alignment, activity monitoring, and insurance lifecycle management difficulties.
The absence of a centralized platform led to time-intensive data extraction, verification, and policy tracking. Brokers struggled to access insurance information seamlessly, causing fragmented workflows and frequent manual interventions. The client required a comprehensive digital solution to enhance broker management, ensure operational transparency, and improve efficiency.

• Incurring High Integration Costs and Inefficiency in Data Parsing:

ASU faced a major challenge in modernizing its underwriting process by extracting data from hundreds of diverse PDF documents. These files contained crucial policyholder information, claim histories, and risk assessments but varied widely in format, quality, and content. The company encountered numerous obstacles, including inconsistent layouts, complex tables, password protection, poor scan quality in older documents, and higher integration costs through third-party applications.

These issues slowed down the underwriting process and introduced risks of errors in risk assessment and pricing decisions. ASU needed a robust PDF parsing solution that could accurately handle various document types, extract data reliably, and integrate with their underwriting algorithms.

• Difficulty with Complex Quotation & Document Generation Process:

ASU required an advanced solution to handle its complex quoting process, which involves up to 200 line items per PDF quote. To ensure efficient underwriting operations and maintain accuracy, they needed a system capable of managing intricate quote structures while preserving performance and data integrity in their insurance policy issuance and pricing processes.

• Failing to Implement Custom ITSME SSO:

ASU faced a significant challenge integrating the ITSME API to obtain accurate business information, legal structure, registration details, etc. This integration required a custom Single Sign-On (SSO) solution for secure login to the store. Additionally, they needed to authenticate brokers on guest pages during onboarding using the ITSME SSO. ASU must ensure seamless and secure access while managing complex authentication processes crucial to the project’s success.

• Challenges with Data Validation and Inconsistency in Excel:

ASU relied on a single Excel sheet with multiple validations to be filled out by brokers or risk site contact persons. Ensuring the data was entered correctly without many changes to the validations, format, font, or cell placement became a significant issue. The ability of users to modify the Excel sheet often led to inconsistencies and errors, complicating the data entry process.

• Facing Difficulty with File Storage Issues:

ASU experienced difficulties managing and storing large volumes of policy documents and related files uploaded by clients or brokers. The existing storage solutions were not scalable, leading to frequent data retrieval issues, increased storage costs, and challenges in efficiently searching for specific data or files.

• Difficulty Developing a Broker Portal:

ASU faced a significant challenge in developing a dedicated portal for brokers to manage their clients and policies effectively. The absence of such a portal limits brokers’ access to crucial information and tools necessary for efficient policy management and client interactions. Additionally, brokers working in multiple companies with different profiles required various levels of access based on the selected company and profile on the portal. Implementing these complex access controls and ensuring seamless functionality posed a major challenge for ASU.

• Challenges in Developing a Unified Insurance Platform:

ASU cannot create a unified online platform for different insurance types. The challenge arises in developing a dynamic architecture to efficiently handle shared components and product-specific elements across various insurance offerings. This required a delicate balance between flexibility and consistency to ensure a seamless user experience for all their products.

• Difficulty in Implementing Multilingual Functionality:

ASU faced a critical challenge in expanding its global reach through its online platform. The company needed help implementing robust multilingual functionality to cater to users from diverse linguistic backgrounds. This required adapting the website’s structure to accommodate different languages seamlessly, not only translating content. The challenge was compounded by the need to maintain consistency in complex insurance terminology across languages, ensure accurate legal and technical content translations, and provide a user-friendly interface that could easily switch between languages.

Solutions

Our experts implemented several innovative solutions leveraging Salesforce technology, custom developments, and Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Salesforce Industries (Vlocity), Financial Service Cloud (FSC), and Experience cloud integrations to streamline operations, enhance data management, and improve user experience across multiple aspects of their insurance underwriting business.