At the recent Insurance Day Summit, Scyllogis Director Colin Whickman spoke on a panel debate about the importance of effective claims management in addressing Solvency 2 challenges.

Questions included:  how do you ensure strict governance, how can improved claims handling contribute to better control of Reserves, and shorten the claims lifecycle and how can an insurer ensure full quality, security and currency of data and keep it adjusted in line with real events throughout the claims process.

Colin focussed on how automation of the claim management process through the use of rule based systems and workflow applications can add real benefit to the claim handling process.

“Rule based systems and workflow enforces the company’s processes and policies and they are also very effective at automatic segregation and routing of claims, enabling the organisation to balance workload even across remote locations, which can help in reducing claims lifecycles”.

“If claims processing is outsourced then deploying these systems into the TPAs ensures that they are handling claims in the same way as internal adjusters”.

“Other benefits of workflow systems are they collect metrics that can be used to analyse throughput times, identify backlogs so that remedial action can be taken to shorten cycle times.  These metrics can also be used to monitor TPAs against service level agreements”.

“Data currency and quality is all about automated data integration.  Manual keying is costly and error prone leading to poor quality.  Data can be out of date simply due to manual processing backlogs.  Automated integration is more scalable, improves quality and opens the possibility of a greater richness of data, collected cost effectively”

On Solvency 2 itself, Colin commented:  “whilst you can argue about the degree to which the regulators are applying Solvency 2 principles, it is hard to argue that the principles themselves are not relevant to a prudent insurer”.