IT-Freedom

ICE Claims - Helping insurers through the recession and beyond

Given the current economic climate insurers business models are under attack from virtually every financial angle. Today consumers have so much choice, softening vulnerable revenue streams even further.

Insurers that ignore their customers’ needs will only foster brief and potentially loss making relationships. To survive, today’s providers need to continuously delight their customers from first transaction through to settlement of any claim. Superior claims management offers a unique route to achieving customer loyalty by providing customers with the highest level of service at a competitive price.

The business case for claims transformation is straightforward to write, in part due to the material and measured gains that can be achieved as a result of fraud reduction, administrative efficiency improvement and reduced indemnity spend. Other areas that the case should address are supply chain optimisation, technology costs, customer retention and time to implement.

Fraud Screening and Detection

During times of economic turmoil and with growing levels of redundancies and business failures, levels of criminal activity always increase. It is essential that any fraud attempt is identified as early as possible in the claims process. This is achieved within ICE Claims by comprehensive fraud screening during the FNOL process.

ICE Claims business rules allow Insurers to define any number of fraud rules to trigger alerts and activities. The fraud rules themselves are made up of three types:

• System Identified Fraud – this happens automatically as part of the claim take on process
• User Identified Fraud – subjective questions completed by the claims handler
• Manual Override of Fraud Score – following automated escalation to supervisor

Using a combination of user configurable business rules and workflow, ICE Claims then drives the process and manages the treatment strategy of the potentially fraudulent claimant.

Special Investigation Units (SIU) can then utilise ICE Claims ability to integrate with external fraud data services such as Synectics, Hunter and Experian Insurance Investigator for more detailed investigation.

IT Freedom is confident that ICE Claims will increase fraud detection and prevention by a factor of between 3 and 7% of an Insurers current fraud rate.

Managing More Claims with Less People – Process Efficiency

Claims teams generally spend too much time progress chasing rather than focusing on handling the claim itself. Paper based systems are still commonplace. Repetitive or routine transactions that can have little impact on the outcome of a claim are frequently too large a part of a claims handlers’ day.

ICE Claims provides the ability to automate business processes and deliver policy holder and service provides self service capabilities such as claims tracking and repair update facilities. This allows claims handlers and call centre staff to operate more efficiently.

IT-Freedoms relationship with Aia Software has facilitated significant process improvement and cost savings in the often overlooked area of document production and management where, historically, non-compliance issues, procedural challenges and operational inefficiencies were rife leading to disgruntled customers, employees and inflated cost of production.
 
The business case for investment in ICE Claims is unambiguous and overwhelming. The potential areas of cost saving are cited below: