Speed and certainty: An evolution in claims management

Aidan O’Neill, CEO of DOCOsoft joined Ian Summers, global business leader, AdvantageGo, on a special episode of the Voice of Insurance podcast.

Claims management has been transformed in the Lloyd’s insurance market since the Millennium, driven by digital transformation, although over the years – and different technology drives within Lloyd’s – systems have taken time to evolve.

Aidan O’Neill, CEO of DOCOsoft, has been a pioneer in document management for claims among insurance carriers in the Lloyd’s market, so he’s able to speak authoritatively on not just the evolution of claims infrastructure, but what matters most to insurance clients.

“The carriers want systems deployed quickly, but they want certainty as well,” he says.

Some 27 carriers are now operating this DOCOsoft core claims management system.

“Half the incoming claims messages that go into the London insurance market, go through DOCOsoft client,” O’Neill  reveals.

O’Neill “has the stripes” of decades of London market experience to back his opinions. He began installing a document management system at Aegis 25 years ago, and was subsequently involved in the first electronic claims file (ECF) workflow at MAP Syndicate at Lloyd’s.

“At that stage, there was no such thing as a claims management system in the market,” he says.

Back then, the policy system would store the syndicate claims message (SCM), and the ECF represented an “early warning” first notification of loss. But as O’Neill notes, the financials were far from accurate, so that anyone who wanted to look at claims financials would look at the policy system.

“What we did was took the ECF message, linked it back to the SCM message, and ultimately evolved into the first enterprise claims management systems that exist today in the London insurance market,” O’Neill says.

“That original system has transformed into what are now the core enterprise claims management systems. Ultimately it looks like a claims dashboard. It links into your policy system. It links into your document management system, but from a user perspective, it’s a dashboard,” he explains.

The evolution continues as the Lloyd’s market’s digital transformation goes on, he explains, from the current DOCOsoft claims management system and the newest software as a service (SaaS) model.

“We have been building out a new cloud-based system since 2020, to be in line with phase two of Blueprint Two. That’s called DOCOsoft View, SaaS via the cloud,” he says.

Since DOCOsoft became part of the AdvantageGo Ecosystem, DOCOsoft’s API and cloud-based system plugs into AdvantageGo’s software, demonstrating just how joined up systems have become in the market.

Connected through the expanding AdvantageGo Ecosystem, the alliance is not only an integration play, but a virtuous circle between two platforms. For instance, AdvantageGo’s ‘Subscribe’ policy administration system can provide data for DOCOsoft, and DOCOsoft’s data can be fed into AdvantageGo’s ‘Underwriting’ workbench solution.

For Ian Summers, Global Business Leader at AdvantageGo, the Ecosystem project is all about forging alliances with ‘best of breed’ partners, each of which owns their own insurtech niche, beyond the focus of AdvantageGo’s own platforms, but which can plug into it, simplifying the relationship with carriers, who can choose to engage via AdvantageGo, and providing clients with options for which niche solutions they want to integrate, and in-so-doing, providing a tailored solution.

“You can hear how complicated it is to have specialists in each area,” he says, providing an update report on the ecosystem’s progress in onboarding more such specialist partners – with artificial intelligence (AI) led capabilities one common factor between them.

Since then [DOCOsoft joined the ecosystem], we’ve had five new partners come on board,” he says.

The first of these is Insurants, which is an AI-led data processing system. The second is Ping, an AI-led data ingestion, data cleansing and geocoding. FortifyData and Relativity6 are the third and fourth partners he lists, cyber-specific data providers, for a cyber tailored iteration of AdvantageGo’s Underwriting Workbench flagship platform. The last one on Summers’ list is Expleo, announced in June, a digital transformation testing specialist. [Note: CyberCube and Swiss Re have also joined the AdvantageGo Ecosystem since the recording of this podcast]

O’Neill explains the appeal of the Ecosystem from DOCOsoft’s clients’ perspective, starting with that desire for speed as well as certainty.

“DOCOsoft’s competition is not a third party vendor, it’s actually the in-house systems companies have developed, trying to build it themselves,” he says. “But there’s a cost challenge and a time challenge to that; they don’t know when it’ll be finished and there’s no certainty they can do it.”

Ecosystems are a more efficient way to deliver, he suggests, core to delivering what clients want.

“We see carriers in industry looking for Ecosystems, where things are pre-built, already integrated, and it’s like Lego blocks. We have more than 20 modules within our own system that companies can choose to adopt, and the Ecosystem is like an extension of that, except the Lego blocks are external, third party companies,” O’Neill says.

“That’s the joy of an ecosystem that you can pick and choose which sanctions model, data ingestion model, core PAS model, and claims module you want to use. Ultimately, the ecosystem works because it gives the client certainty that the stuff works it’s integrated and you can try it out,” he continues.

Underlying this, the challenge is really about data flowing through these systems, which is ultimately what drives more effective management and decision-making within teams.

O’Neill adds: “Imagine that you’re demonstrating to a carrier with their own data, which goes through, comes in on the PAS, it shows claims coming in, with some AI processing – it makes the demonstration far more powerful, and gives certainty that the thing will bloody work!”