Developing a marine insurer’s claims management solution
Provision of flexible alternative resourcing and designing an accessible in-house claims solution
The opportunity
A client required assistance managing a large volume of insurance claims relating to major vessel casualties. A lack of junior resource, compounded by a process which was not centralized or structured and didn’t leverage technology, resulted in significant demand on senior and highly specialist internal resource. There was no suitable pre-existing claims system on the market that met the client’s requirements.
The solution
Paralegals from our Legal Services Team (LST) in Newcastle were placed in-house with the client and initially assisted with urgent claims before turning their attention to longer-term solutions.
As a first step, they defined the issues and implemented an initial short-term solution - redesigning spreadsheets and processes to improve data capture and realize some standardization. The administration of the claims process was then handed over to the LST with client oversight at key decision points. During the busiest periods, the LST was able to quickly scale the number of paralegals in the team accordingly.
While all this led to immediate and significant improvements including time and cost savings, it was evident that data analysis opportunities were still difficult to access and that an intuitive, easy to access and collaborative tool would be required. It would have to be suitable for ongoing maintenance and adaptation to different scenarios and parameters, including configuration to different and evolving internal claims processes.
Working with the Innovation, Design and Technology (IDT) team, the LST were able to build a sophisticated core system using app development and collaboration platform technologies, with architecture that allowed for customization and future development by the in-house team.
Results and benefits
The combination of flexible paralegal resourcing and the bespoke claims portal has become the client’s standard solution to major shipping casualties resulting in high volume claims. The benefits include:
-
flexible cost-effective resourcing for the administration of the claims processes using the bespoke application, which is cloud based and fully collaborative;
-
an application allowing for improved user experience, with a bespoke, easy to use platform reducing the complexity and time to process and manage claims;
-
structured, high-quality data; and
-
detailed insights available for commercial application.
