Our client, a leading U.K. based insurer, offers one of the widest range of insurance products from cars and motorcycles to agricultural vehicles as well as home insurance. It provides insurance to over 1 million policyholders, and insures one in three motorcycles in the U.K. The company is recognized for its benchmark performance in service delivery, technical expertise, claims management and underwriting excellence, and today is Lloyd’s largest personal lines syndicate.

The Challenge

The entry of new players into the insurance industry, coupled with the introduction of new technology, has resulted in a change in customer loyalty and buying behavior patterns. This trend, coupled with the introduction of more stringent regulations has made the insurance industry increasingly competitive. To maintain profitability and improve revenues, insurers are pressured to not only reduce cost, but deliver higher levels of customer service.

Our client adopted business process outsourcing as part of its operating model to improve efficiencies, rationalize costs and enhance competitiveness. In 2002, they partnered with WNS in order to tap into our deep domain expertise and operational excellence.

According to our client, they chose WNS because, “We were one of the early adopters of outsourcing as part of our business model, and evaluated a number of providers before deciding to partner with WNS. We were impressed with WNS’s commitment to our business, their understanding of the insurance industry, their strong operational capability and, above all, their alignment with our culture, which was critical for the success of this program.”

The WNS Solution

Beginning in 2002 with 25 people and one process - documentation and recording of new business - the WNS team serving the client has now grown to over 125 staff delivering a suite of underwriting, claims administration, and broking operations processes.

As part of the underwriting process, WNS delivers a full range of processes for motor cars (both individual and fleet), agricultural vehicles, motorcycles, and special risk coverage. The range of services include

• Setting up policies

• Issuing policy certificates and schedules

• Updating the U.K. motor insurance database

• Amending policies when required

• Renewals

In the area of claims administration, WNS delivers the following processes

• Claims Bordereaux

• Indexing and referencing

To support broking operations, WNS delivers the following processes

• Issuing quotations for new business

• Setting up new business

• Issuing policy documents and schedules

• Amending policies when required

• Renewals

Each process migration commenced with an exhaustive diagnostic of the clients business processes using WNS’s proprietary methodology. Based on the findings, WNS developed a detailed transition plan, which resulted in a smooth and phased transition of the processes into WNS’s delivery centers in India without interrupting normal business operations. WNS also implemented a fast track accreditation and training program, which reduced training of WNS’s staff from eight weeks to two weeks.

WNS consolidated the underwriting and policy administration processes to ensure higher efficiencies. By cross training of staff across processes, WNS was able to support the dynamic business environment of the client.

WNS supports many high risk and complex specialist products in addition to personal lines and motorcycle categories, requiring underwriting to be delivered by a Special Risks team. Given the specialized nature of the products insured, and the wide range of insurance schemes, the WNS staff must refer to over 90 different conditions when underwriting a single policy. Adding to process complexity is the high frequency of updates to the schemes and the volatility of transaction volumes.

To continuously improve service delivery, WNS undertook several Six Sigma initiatives to

• Improve the accuracy of renewals from approximately 90 percent to over 97 percent and the accuracy of pre-renewal processes from 92 percent to over 96 percent

• Improve the average handling time (AHT) of pre-renewal and new policy processing by half to 9 minutes and 2.5 minutes per policy, respectively

• Reduce the referral percentage across processes

• Improve the turnaround time in the claims administration process by 65 percent to less than 48 hours

WNS also supports decision making by providing our client with MIS and dashboards on underwriting including new business and lapsed policy analyses, renewals analysis by broker and their area of operation.

Benefits delivered by the WNS team

By consolidating and standardizing the business processes, improving process efficiencies, reducing cost of operations and enhancing customer service, the WNS team has extended the clients enterprise. Specific benefits delivered to the client by the WNS team include

• Faster response time for customer inquiries – Improved to within 24 hours with an accuracy rate of over 98 percent

• Improvement in the average handling time for inquiries – Improved by a range of 10-15 percent through the creation of ready reference files

• Reduced referrals – Reduced from 12.5 percent to 10 percent in the Special Risk team and from 6 percent to 1 percent in the Fleet team

The number of business processes delivered by WNS has increased from 19 to 98 in six years, while the corresponding range of work has evolved from simple transaction processing to highly complex underwriting which underscores the business value delivered by WNS.

As a result of WNS’s performance, the client has increased WNS’s level of authorization for the claims department for suppliers’ payments from GBP 500 to GBP 10,000.