David Culhane, Solution Architect, FINEOS
You’ve identified a new insurance product that you want to bring to market. Actuarial, Legal and Marketing have completed their due diligence, and the final hurdle to product launch is to ensure your claims department can process new claims. The natural tendency for an insurer is to aim for sophisticated new product support from the claims system from day one. This blog explores an alternative approach to launching your new product that will a) ensure a quick go to market, key in today’s competitive market place where early to market is hugely advantageous and b) ensure support for the new product is targeted at the correct areas, thus ensuring any investment is spent wisely.
A new product may take time to gain traction in the market and hence early claim volumes are often low before steadily growing over the coming years. With that in mind, is it necessary to have full system integration and automation for your new product from day one? This alternative approach looks at a rapid implementation to get to day one and a more targeted approach to day two.
The following are the high-level activities to define the day one landscape that will get you to market quickly:
- Empower a subset of claims processing staff on the new product
- Define the new product processes and map these to your claim system capabilities, day one it’s okay to have some manual or off system processes
- Configure your claims system to support the new product, this is key as we’re limiting the day one implementation to configuration which ensures no software development lifecycles and a quick go to market
You’re now ready to start processing those new claims, and soon can start to use real world data and feedback to inform your day two landscape including the following:
- Review claim trends
- Collate metrics from the claims system
- Elicit feedback from the claims processing staff
The above information is hugely powerful; analyze this to determine how efficiencies can be achieved, asking questions such as; “are there efficiencies to be achieved by”:
- Integrating the claims system with other systems within your organization
- Automating claim adjudication
- Automating calculations
Use the claim trends, metrics and feedback to answer those questions. If you want to take it further, perform some cost benefit analysis (CBA) on items to help inform decisions. From this you can build up a picture of the day two landscape and define the scope to implement the day two setup which will ensure your organization is future proofed for those increasing claim volumes.
So, in a nutshell, to bring your product to market quickly: review claims patterns, collate metrics and elicit feedback. Armed with this information you can make smart choices for the day two landscape. Think of it as an Agile approach to your new product.
