BPO Solutions for Insurance Industry

The insurance industry is challenged by competitive pressures, changes in customer loyalty, entry of new players and a stringent regulatory environment, all of which are pressuring insurers to change their business models, streamline operations, and improve processes. Industry leaders are increasingly turning to insurance outsourcing to help them compete and grow.

Building upon our deep experience of delivering business processes for several of the world’s leading insurers, WNS combines deep domain expertise, strong talent and operational excellence to allow insurers focus on their core business while WNS delivers business processes such as industry specific processes, finance and accounting, business and financial research, analytics, and optimizing the power of technology.

Our insurance outsourcing service offerings extend across the insurance value chain of Property and Casualty, Life, Pensions, and Annuity.

Our service offerings include

Property and Casualty

■ New Business

Data Management
Channel Support
Quotes
Premium Calculations
Sales/ Quotes acceptance & conversion
Customer Retention/ Cross and up-sell
Customer Enquiries
Actuarial Support
Exposure Assessment

■ Policy Set up

Underwriting
Underwriting Support
Verification / Validation
Delivery Requirements
Premium Calculation
Follow up
Policy Issue
New Business Rating

■ Policy Changes

Customer Service
Name/ Owner/ Address Changes
Certificate Re-issue
Adjustments/Endorsements/ Rider & Coverage Changes
Renewals and Quotes
Cancellations

■ Premiums

Collections
Remittance exceptions
Reconciliations
Refunds
Billing
Premium Mode Change
Bank Changes
Premium Audits
Customer Service

■ Claims

First Notification of Loss
Claim Set-up
Investigation/ examination
Review & assessment
Coding
Reserves
Customer Service
Policy Specific emergency assistance
Supplier Support
Excess/ Deductable Management
Settlement Agreement
3rd Party Claims (property damage & bodily injury)
Subrogation
Recoveries
Fraud Checks
Claim Finalization

■ Payments

Customer Service
Settlement Payments
3rd party payments
Closing Payments

■ Support Services

Document management
IT Support
F&A
Analytics

Life, Pensions and Annuities

■ New Business

Channel Support
Quotes
Customer Enquiries
Actuarial Support

■ Policy Set up

Underwriting Support
Money Laundering Check
Delivery Requirements
Follow up
Enrollment
Policy issue

■ Policy Changes

Customer Service
Name / Owner / Beneficiary / Address Changes
Certificate Re-issue
Adjustments / Endorsements / Rider & Coverage Changes / Fund Changes
Lapses
Quotes & Reinstatements
Renewals and Quotes
Terminations
Cancellations
Surrenders

■ Policy Benefits

Policy Loans
Withdrawals
Dividend
Customer Service

■ Premiums

Collections
Remittance exceptions
Fund application
Reconciliations
Refunds
Billing
Premium mode change
Premium Holidays
Bank Changes
Premium Audits
Customer Service

■ Payments

Customer Service
Closing Payments
Automatic Payment Withdrawals (APW)
Maturities
Tax Competence

■ Support Services

Document management
IT Support
HR & Payroll
F&A
Analytics

■ Agency / Distribution Management

Insurance provider set-up
License registration
Contracting
Customer service
Renewals
Terminations
Commissions
Special compensation
Accounting
Cash application
Billing

Case Studies

Industry: Insurance
Process: IT Helpdesk

Center of Excellence for Functions Managing Internal and External IT Helpdesk Functions for a Global Insurance Company

Benefits delivered by the WNS team

Streamlined IT helpdesks:For the client, maintaining IT helpdesks across multiple locations meant burgeoning costs, and overall customer and employee dissatisfaction. WNS advised the client on setting up either an onshore or offshore Center of Excellence (CoE). The client decided to go ahead with WNS’s suggestion of opening the CoE at Chennai, India, due to the availability of resources with requisite abilities in the IT-enabled services domain. This helped drastically streamline the client’s IT helpdesks
Better process standardization: With the creation of detailed manuals / process maps / flow charts.
Enhanced cost savings: WNS enabled the accrual of revenue savings of 60 percent in its very first year of providing an IT helpdesk outsourcing solution.
Improved organizational efficiency: WNS structured the helpdesk team into three separate units: The IT Access team, the Service desk team and the Remote desktop team, each with a different set of responsibilities. Specifying roles and dividing responsibilities have led to improved organizational efficiency with each team processing and handling huge number of requests on a monthly basis.
Faster Turnaround time: WNS helped improve TAT through implementing a TAT monitoring system and access provisioning.

Industry: Life Insurance
Process: Actuarial reporting

Improving operational efficiencies and accuracy of actuarial reporting for a leading insurance provider

Benefits delivered by the WNS team

Onshore actuarial staff re-focused on strategic initiatives:Withthe WNS team deliveringa large part of the reporting requirements, the high-costactuarial staff of theclient re-positioned to focus on more strategic initiativeswithin the client organization
Increased the number of checks and controls for data and basisvalidation whilemeeting the tight timelines of report submission
Timely submission of detailed audit packs for internal and externalaudits
Right mix of actuarial and statistical skills for cost optimization
Standardized approach to reporting was established resulting inmore accurate insightsbeing generated
Greater flexibility in generating ad hoc reports for compliancepurposes

Industry: Banking and Financial Services
Process: New account set-up, Account administration, Document management, Client account administration, Insurance recovery, Licensing and field compensation, Brokers support

Delivering a robust,scalable and cost effective back office for a leading U.S. brokerage house

Benefits delivered by the WNS team

Flexible pricing model - Since commencement of the partnership,WNS has been billing the client on a Unit Transaction Pricing (UTP) model for asubstantial portion of the scope. This allows for greater flexibility for the clientas its business volumes fluctuate; for example, volumes can surge by as much as30-40 percent during the tax period. This requires meticulous planning between boththe client and the WNS team to manage fluctuating volumes.
Rapid scaling of operations - WNS scaled the operations rapidlyassuming the delivery of 24 processes ranging from low to high complexity within6 months of engagement commencement
Deep domain expertise - WNS initially created a pool of domainexperts to provide advice on the salient features of the client's products. Today,given the power of this capability, the client has transitioned all transactionsto WNS.
Right staff certifications - The WNS team obtained FINRA certificationsto support certain products
Robust quality management - To ensure continuous improvement, WNShas deployed quality management tools such as Failure Mode Effect Analysis (FMEA)to ensure every step of the process is evaluated for potential failure.
Robust business continuity - WNS cross-trained 30 percent of theproject resources as part of a business continuity strategy.

Industry: Banking and Financial Services
Process: New account set up, account administration, licensing and field compensation support, portfolio adjustments, broker / advisor support, service recoveries, special investigations and reimbursements, check processing and document operations, Change of ownership, Estate settlement

Managing the back-office for a range of products for a leading U.S. brokerage and insurance house

Benefits delivered by the WNS team

The WNS process improvement program has yielded dramatic results with regard toquality of delivery and reduction in the cycle time.
- Delivered an accuracy of over 99.95 percent across all processes
- Improved service quality to between 3.5 sigma to 6 sigma
- Improved accuracy performance across all processes reducing the
overall defective processing by over 78 percent across all the products.
With effective management of shifts, and substantial re-engineering of workflow,WNS was able to deliver a significant improvement in turnaround time
WNS devised a unique performance incentive plan for its associates which ensuredthat quality expectations are met at all times while delivering higher revenues.The plan is designed in a manner that payouts happen only if quality targets aremet at the individual level. There is also a provision to earn a bonus if the associateachieves higher productivity numbers in comparison to pre-set targets. The additionalpayout is made on a per case basis and has increased productivity across the board.In addition to the regular payout plan, WNS also provides incentives for tenurebased on pre-defined tiers, which has played a major role in talent retention.

Industry: Insurance
Process: Analytics

Formulated lifetime model for agency compensation to boost sales productivity.

Benefits delivered by the WNS team

Supported the successful launch of a new compensation plan for its agents.
Assessed the effectiveness of a range of marketing campaigns, thereby helping theclient devise the future campaigns.
Delivered better insights into agent performance.

Industry: Insurance
Process: Demand Modelling

Created a comprehensive demand model to help a leading insurer increase customer retention by one percent.

Benefits delivered by the WNS team

The client was able to improve policy retention by one percent and maintain thesame levels of profitability by deploying demand models in their pricing strategy.
A key result of this project was that the client was able to extend the demand-pricingmodel for the auto insurance products to other states in the U.S. as part of itsnationwide strategy.

Industry: Insurance
Process: Claims processing, Customer service

This client is a leading provider of insurance products in Europe with substantial business entities and units located around the world.

Benefits delivered by the WNS team

Increasing daily collections by 30 percent within the first year resulting in significantfinancial advantages for business
Reducing claims settlement time by almost 40 percent from 212 days to less than130 days, resulting in higher customer satisfaction
Increasing the speed at which claims were sent to legal counsel by 90 percent fromover 25 days to less than two days immediately after transition.
Generating additional business of 5 percent amounting to GBP 3.6 million in collectionsper year by identifying revenue leakages caused by claims that were not being registeredin the system.

Industry: Insurance
Process: Insurance underwriting, Claims administration, Broking operations

A UK based insurance company, who is today one of the top five motor insurers in the UK, offering one of the widest ranges of insurance from cars and motorcycles to agricultural vehicles as well as home insurance. It provides insurance to over one million policyholders, and insures one in three motorcycles in the UK.

Benefits delivered by the WNS team

By consolidating and standardising the business processes,improving process efficiencies, reducing cost of operations and enhancing customer service, the WNS team has extended the clients enterprise. Specific benefits delivered to the client by the WNS team include

Faster response time for customer inquiries – Improved towithin 24 hours with an accuracy rate of over 98 percent
Improvement Improvement in the average handling time for inquiries– Improved by a range of 10-15 percent through the creation of ready referencefiles
Reduced referrals – Reduced from 12.5 percent to 10 percentin the Special Risk team and from 6 percent to one percent in the Fleet team.