Insurtech Root and Shackleton Life have partnered to overhaul the long-term insurance company’s policy administration system (PAS). The new system has reduced the time taken to generate a policy by 70%, from 20 minutes to six minutes.
Shackleton Life’s core product is bond protection insurance, complemented by related products such as Life Cover with limited underwriting, insurance for the immediate needs of families following the death of a bondholder, as well as cover for expenses involved in executing a deceased estate, cancer Insurance which pays out on diagnosis of cancer, as well as building insurance.
Shackleton has also brought cover for pets’ vet bills to market and continues to push the boundaries of insurance product innovation to meet real market needs.
Policy longevity
Unlike similar bond cover offered by banks that usually terminates when the bond is paid off, the Shackleton Life product continues as a whole-of-life policy. In this way, clients retain the benefits of years of premium payments. Shackleton Life’s products are underwritten by Old Mutual Alternative Risk Transfer Limited (OMART).
Root offers insurers a platform on which to build, sell and administer insurance products. The company works with insurers to digitise their processes and systems to be able to deliver better customer service and develop new products themselves.
Previously, Shackleton Life’s PAS relied on manual input by sales agents to capture a request for insurance in a system that would produce the proposal. A separate process would then be used to check the proposal, and share it with clients by email. Once accepted, a third system would capture the final agreement and manage the rest of the life of the policy, including the claims process and renewals.
Standard data preparation procedures performed as part of the insurance book migration onto Root indicated that this previous manual process had led to a number of inconsistencies in how data was captured. In turn, this led to customer service concerns, which the company wanted to prevent. This is not unusual for insurers operating their businesses on legacy infrastructure.
“We have been working with Root for a number of years, and built some of our newer products on their platform. But the core of our business was still running on the manual process, and we needed to bring our main book onto the Root platform too,” says Gareth Kitto, MD of Shackleton Life.
Digitised process reduces human error
“Root combines every function involved in a policy’s lifecycle into a single process flow, from automatically creating policy documents, sending emails to customers, collecting premiums, automating renewals and lapses and managing the claims resolution process,” says Charlotte Koep, chief operating officer of Root. “The completely digitised process eliminates human error (such as forgetting to attach a document to an email message). Users are able to keep track of their policies and customers, and management has sight of business activities and performance.”
Kitto adds: “The migration was completed in three successively larger tranches of thousands of policies at a time. The Root and Shackleton teams worked hand in hand throughout the entire migration. Our clients were not negatively affected by the migration, and in fact are now experiencing better service. Our brokers are also happier, as there is no longer a backlog of policies waiting to be captured and activated.”
This has freed up agents who previously dealt with backlogs in paperwork to do higher-level customer care, including being able to assist during spikes in call volumes, such as after a large thunderstorm, for instance.
Shackleton Life is currently using the Root platform to develop additional insurance products for its customers, details of which will be announced in due course.