A top 5 Life Insurance Carrier leveraged no-code to transform their advisor-led selling experience with a fully digitized end-to-end eApplication, ultimately achieving faster time-to-market while retaining flexibility—at no added cost.
Advisors must focus on selling and managing their client relationships. Unfortunately, insurance agents find themselves wasting time on manual tasks at the expense of this. According to McKinsey, 20–30% of an agent’s workday is focused on documentation alone.
This insurance carrier was using a common point solution, and found that it was too rigid to support what their agents and customers needed: a streamlined, end-to-end new business process. This resulted in manual workarounds (e.g., redundant data entry across multiple screens) and lower than desired efficiency (e.g., lack of digital collaboration between agents and customers).
Wanting to eliminate the administrative burden and improve the client and Service experience, the carrier partnered with Unqork to replace the incumbent point solution with a customized eApplication. Ultimately, this would create a major competitive differentiator by enabling policy issuance within a coveted 48 hours. Here is how the transformation was accomplished—and built without writing or editing a single line of code.
[T]he carrier partnered with Unqork to replace the incumbent point solution with a customized eApplication… enabling policy issuance within a coveted 48 hours.
The Need
To offer a competitive advisor experience, the client wanted a fully digitized end-to-end application that accomplished the following:
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Deliver new features and improvements to market faster, using internal teams—as opposed to relying on the point solution development team or another external vendor and operating within their constraints
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Provide a superior advisor, customer, and Service experience
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Streamline the decisioning process to deliver a policy from application to issuance within 48 hours
They could not accomplish this with their current point solution, particularly the quick iterations as users were “locked in” to the parameters of the software. To define the future state, the team outlined the key components they wanted to realize for agents (listed above) and the automation they wanted to achieve in the process (e.g., eliminate duplicate data entry, significantly decrease not in good order (NIGO) applications).
After exploring a series of Buy vs. Build solutions, they zeroed in on Unqork due to Unqork’s insurance focus, ability to support a true Agile framework, and platform roadmap that emphasized a plan to help customers realize the value proposition longer term.
The Solution
Implementation
Since Unqork fosters iterative development, the team piloted with a small group of advisors first and then expanded to get needed feedback. Advisors were happy to see their feedback was heard and rapidly factored into the experience.
The delivery team operated on a fully Agile framework with strong product ownership (i.e., the product owner understands the business and is decisive) and worked solely “in” the Unqork platform to minimize external, disconnected documentation. The team launched this application in record time, while continuously delivering improvements—all without needing to rely on a third-party professional services firm or the point solution vendor.
Since launch, the team has been enhancing the application in an Agile fashion. First came the basic eApplication. Then, they added integrations to drive efficiencies and eventually Send to Client capabilities. Next, they connected the application to the illustration system. To further accelerate the process, the team is continuing to expand the application to support integrations with rules engines and third-party data providers.
Capabilities delivered
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Client collaboration: Enables advisors to easily submit information that they filled out to their clients. This was initially for Personal History and Medical Questions, but is now a capability across the entire application.
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Accelerated response time: Allow a case to be issued in 48 hours for qualifying clients thanks to a streamlined experience
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IGO/NIGO: Ensures all applications are received in good order with a robust, configurable solution
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Smart interfaces: Eliminate manual workarounds—no more double-checking data sources manually—and accelerate the end-to-end process with a number of smart interfaces including Advisor L&A checks, Client LexisNexis checks, and bank account validation. All of these are being further enriched to move the decisioning process at an earlier point in the process and give the advisor clear info at the point of sale.
In progress is an integration with the SwissRe Magnum rules engine to collect accurate underwriting information. Eventually, this will enable advisors to receive a data-driven UW decision at the point of sale. This will be a critical next step as customers expect near-instant decisions, and most carriers are unable to provide them. Unqork’s client ultimately will, due to straight-through processing and this integrated rules engine.
Impact
Having completely replaced their industry point solution with an eApplication built using Unqork’s no-code platform, they now enjoy an application that serves all retail and independent advisors. End-to-end digital transformation means that manual workarounds are eliminated, providing a satisfying experience for their agents—a powerful competitive differentiator for the life industry.
The annual licensing cost is equivalent to that of their previous eApplication, but the business value achieved has proven to be tremendous.
When new regulations in Washington state led to a nearly ~200% increase in volume within a 4-week period, the application was able to support this and there was no business disruption.
100% of applications moved into Unqork, which quickly demonstrated that it could handle their increase in life application volumes. When new regulations in Washington state led to a nearly ~200% increase in volume within a 4-week period, the application was able to support this and there was no business disruption.
Month over month, applications in the platform have increased on average by 10%, and the platform was able to sustain spikes of over 100%.
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