Claims: a key opportunity for innovation
Claims management can be costly and resource-intensive. With increasing workloads, rising customer expectations, and mounting pressures like fraud, there’s a significant opportunity to leverage new technology, such as business rules engines, to drive operational efficiencies and reduce costs.
Insurers have been using RDT’s “Agile Composition Engine” (ACE), their workflow orchestration software designed to gradually automate insurance processes, without requiring major legacy system replacements or extensive transformation projects. “It’s a product that automates processes and decision-making. It provides communication and can escalate tasks to claims professionals to manage them if necessary,” explains Jon Mitchell.
Through this, we manage around £2 billion of premium – mainly personal lines. Our products support hundreds of thousands of claims annually and tens of millions of quote requests via aggregators and broker software houses.
Solving real insurance challenges
RDT is committed to developing technology solutions that address genuine challenges in the insurance industry, rather than creating products in search of a problem. To this end, RDT invests over £2 million annually in research and development, focusing on key areas such as policy management, claims handling, and most recently, integration and automation.
“When our clients partner with us, we make it a priority to understand their specific needs. Listening to our customers is the first step, and from these conversations, common themes and challenges naturally emerge,” says Jon.
Currently, one significant area of interest is the reduction of claims costs, as well as the automation of indemnity and claims expenditure.
Jon adds, “We’re also observing the growing importance of digital Third Party Administrators (TPAs). Many of our customers are leveraging new technologies to bring more claims processing in-house through TPAs, giving them greater control over the customer experience. This shift allows them to enhance the customer journey and improve service quality using advanced solutions like ACE.”
By focusing on real industry problems, RDT ensures that their innovations are not just technological advances but meaningful solutions that improve efficiency, reduce costs, and elevate the overall customer experience in the insurance sector.
Today, ACE accelerates claims processing for several insurers and MGAs, powering complex workflows for repair, recovery, indemnity, total loss, and personal injury.
Specialty insurers, specialty solution
In recent years, RDT has seen a growing demand for bespoke products within its ACE solution. Since ACE operates independently from RDT’s traditional general insurance offerings, it is versatile enough to be deployed across various markets and integrate with most technology stacks. While RDT has historically focused on general insurance, the company is now discovering that the automation-driven approach common in personal lines insurance is highly applicable to the specialty insurance market as well.
“We’re noticing a strong trend among specialty insurers to embrace digital innovation,” says Jon. “The expertise we’ve honed in other sectors positions us perfectly to support this shift, as evidenced by the promising discussions we’re having with these providers.”
There are valuable lessons to be learned from Personal Lines insurance, where customisation and automation have revolutionised customer engagement. Similarly, RDT is poised to bring this mentality to specialty insurance, driving efficiency and enhancing the customer experience.
“Additionally, as ACE expands beyond our initial customers, we have recognised that many potential clients operate on legacy systems that were not originally designed for modern automation”. RDT has developed advanced methods to ensure ACE can integrate with legacy systems used by other businesses, reducing downtime and avoiding disruptions.
Planning the journey
According to Jon, a key strength of ACE is its ability to empower users to design and refine processes that are unique to their business. As companies navigate their digital transformation, ACE enables a strategic approach, integrating intelligence into workflows step by step.
The platform offers a variety of predefined workflow templates specifically tailored for the insurance sector, while also providing the flexibility to create and modify workflows to suit individual needs. By leveraging ACE, users can create and automate processes and harness data insights to identify inefficiencies, cost drivers, and opportunities for continuous improvement.
Empowering “rockstar” experiences
The reason that RDT has been successful, according to Jon, is that every day, ACE manages a mix of human and automated interactions to handle motor insurance claims with far less manual effort for claims handlers, while ensuring human expertise can be called on when required.
The response from insurers, call handlers and customers has been very positive, said Jon.
One of our clients said ACE makes their claims handlers look like rockstars, because it lets them act on the data much faster. Now, they only need to get involved where it is clear they will actually make a difference. Companies using ACE can now see the claim progressing without them needing to get involved.
Another customer had a claims process that had eight customer touch points. That’s now down to an average of one-and-a-half touchpoints. From the customer’s perspective, there’s less friction in the claims process – resulting in a quicker and much better experience.
Additionally, ACE can automatically pinpoint areas where claims handlers can add more value, such as identifying when a customer is vulnerable and requires special attention. This ensures that businesses not only streamline their operations but also enhance the quality of their customer interactions.
Preparing for the future
Jon and the team at RDT are always looking for opportunities to help insurers work more efficiently. Like many technology providers, AI (artificial intelligence) looks set to play a big part in that.
Jon explained that “ACE can leverage data from external sources to create a dynamic, self-learning system that continually improves. With thousands of data points available, the system meticulously tracks every decision, enabling it to learn, adapt, and evolve over time. By adapting to every decision, ACE can pave the way for creating AI solutions unique to your business”.
Discover more about RDT’s work within the insurance industry by visiting its website. While you’re there, Jon recommends taking a moment to check out RDT’s latest white paper (Navigating the future of claims management).
