Insurance
Case Study
Comprehensive Operational Support
Driving Growth
Performance highlights
• Reduced turnaround times
• Reduced outstanding account
balances
• Audit coverage moved from
50% to 100% of agreements
• Staff attrition held at a
record low per annum
• Reduced operational costs
by 40%
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Client Profile
Our client is one of the world’s largest specialty insurer and reinsurers. They
have assets worth in excess of $7b and operate in 9 countries with 1,200
employees.
Employing specialty underwriting expertise, the client’s Commercial Specialty
segment delivers custom insurance products and services through a broad
distribution network of partners. They target business classes and industries
with distinct risk profiles that can benefit from specially designed insurance
programs, tailored loss control and expert claims handling.
The client company prides itself on the strong relationships developed with
its distribution partners, which is essential to deliver a broad array of over
2,000 products to the Commercial Specialty marketplace. They lead the way
with insurance to retailers, restaurateurs, mining companies, wineries and fine
arts programs.
Challenge: The Driver for Change
The client company as a group was growing rapidly through acquisition,
having doubled its Commercial & Specialty business with the purchase of a
competitor and then acquiring 3 specialist insurers covering six new markets
in the USA.
The priority at board level was to integrate the new acquisitions into the
group processes and systems, while leveraging the new skills and products
across markets to enable the acquisitions to reach their full potential.
The growing pains for the new group were significant and across the
complete lifecycle of insurance services.
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Insurance
Case Study
Comprehensive Operational Support Driving Growth
Sutherland’s Outsourcing
Excellence Delivers Quantifiable
benefits across all areas of
process, people and technology.
Tracking of compliance against
audits and policies is reported on
a monthly basis and Sutherland
has doubled the coverage
previously achieved by our client.
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Specifically the board of directors was concerned with:
• Missed proposal opportunities due to bottlenecks in the
underwriting teams.
• Inconsistency in the quality of service to Insurance Agents causing
confusion and missed business opportunities.
• Duplicate functions across the group working to different processes causing
inefficiencies and delays for customers.
• Backlog in actuarial services preventing the board from understanding the
full exposure to risk with the new group.
• Poor discipline with account reconciliations and collections impacting
cash flow.
Our client made it clear that above all else, the transformation was to
prioritize on supporting growth, re-focusing staff and eliminating waste in
their business processes. It was not to de-skill roles and move jobs offshore.
The Solution
In the autumn of 2010, Sutherland launched a high level discovery process to
observe and define current processes and identify the scope for improvement.
Sutherland then benchmarked key metrics, and outlined the new operational
model and transition approach.
Each process migration commenced with an exhaustive diagnostic of
the client’s processes using a Sutherland proprietary methodology. Then
Sutherland developed a detailed transition plan, which resulted in a smooth
and phased transition of the processes into the insurance centre of excellence
in Kochi without interrupting normal business operations.
Given the specialized nature of the products insured, and the wide range
of insurance schemes, the Sutherland staff referred to over 80 different
conditions when underwriting a single policy. Adding to process complexity
was the high frequency of updates to the schemes and the volatility of
transaction volumes.
Sutherland undertook several Six Sigma initiatives which:
• Rationalized IT systems from 45 to 12 removing redundant and duplicate
processes.
• Implemented ResQ, actuarial software to streamline the
data/risk calculation process.
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Insurance
Case Study

Comprehensive Operational Support Driving Growth

• Developed a fast track accreditation and training program, reducing

training of Sutherland staff from eight to two weeks.
• Consolidated the underwriting and policy administration processes to
ensure higher efficiencies and speed of response to agents.
• Established an offshore underwriting support team with specialist risk
assessment and catastrophe modeling skills.
• Used time-zone difference to compress turnaround timelines. Kochi being
7 hours in front of the UK.
• Created a centralized Agent Support Team responsible for account
reconciliations and query handling.
• Implemented a centralized monitoring system to report on policy
processing performance and submission quality.
• New Binding Authority Audit System that determines high risk transactions
and identifies processing irregularities for action.
• Review and audit requested reparation actions by the loss adjusters to
ensure all actions are in line with authorization limits and only authorized
vendors are used in carrying out remediation work. Where new vendors
or authorizations were required, Sutherland ensured that the actions were
completed to limit any delays in the claims process.

Sutherland’s approach is to offer

a set of integrated services that
support both front and back end
processing requirements.

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Insurance
Case Study

Comprehensive Operational Support Driving Growth

Agent Management
Sutherland services all aspects of agent management, taking direct
responsibility for ensuring the accuracy of Agent account balances, tracking
commission and receipts, processing cancellation notices as well as
issuing credit due on early terminations. All data and transactions are now
guaranteed to a 98% accuracy level. This change has helped the client’s
team focus on driving the core Insurance business forward rather than
resolving historical system discrepancies.

Centralized Agent Support Team

Underwriting support has grown dramatically over the first 10 months of our
service, with Sutherland taking ownership of pricing for contract renewals and
simple amendments to policies.

Underwriting Support over 10 month period

90
75
Thousands

60
45
30
15
0
m1 m2 m3 m4 m5 m6 m7 m8 m9 m10
m = month
E&S Underwriting Support Commercial Underwriting Support

Claims Support
In the event of a claim Sutherland processes the first notification of loss,
collecting all relevant information and passing the completed case details
to a Loss Adjuster. We handle agent and customer interactions, issuing
notifications of the claim, handling any policy excess requirements as well as
checking prior claims history for anomalies.

We handle claims working to guaranteed service levels of 4 to 8 hour

turnaround from First Notice of Loss to assignment of an Adjuster.

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Insurance
Case Study

Comprehensive Operational Support Driving Growth

Claims Support over 10 month period

35
30

Thousands
25
20
15
10
5
0
m1 m2 m3 m4 m5 m6 m7 m8 m9 m10
m = month
Commercial Claims Support E&S Claims Support

Supplier Management
Sutherland manages all interactions with vendors including agreeing
statements of account, managing vendor data, resolution of unclaimed
checks and general account queries. Since we’ve taken on this activity we
have reduced the number of supplier disputes and brought all approved
payments to within supplier’s terms.

Compliance & Regulatory Standards

With the increased focus on corporate compliance and ever changing
regulatory standards, Sutherland has helped the client develop stronger
controls and insight into its operations. Our service provides audits and
regulatory reporting for the following aspects;
• 100% of all Binding Authority Management policies issued
• 100% Agent Accounts audited & reconciled on an annual basis
• 100% of all travel and entertainment claims audited for compliance
with company policy
• 1099/1042 Tax Reporting
• Local Sales Tax Reporting
Tracking of compliance against audits and policies is reported on a monthly
basis and Sutherland has doubled the coverage previously achieved by the
client.

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Insurance
Case Study

Comprehensive Operational Support Driving Growth

Compliance Audits over 10 month period

105%

100%

95%

90%

85%

80%

75%

70%
m1 m2 m3 m4 m5 m6 m7 m8 m9 m10
Target Credit Control Admin Binding Authority Management
Underwriting Support Client Company Direct Limit

Payment Processing & Accounting Support

In order to drive down cost for indirect operational activities Sutherland
has moved payment processing and accounting support to our center of
excellence in Chennai. At this center, all invoices are coded and batch
processed into the Oracle AP system and preliminary payment runs made
for the client’s team to approve. Our service also handles all ad-hoc
requirements for payments and check requests.

The Sutherland team is responsible for daily and monthly cash reconciliations,
with unapplied cash being resolved within a 24 hour service level. We
perform all month end reconciliations between both the accounts receivable
and accounts payable ledgers with the general ledger. The team takes
responsibility for journal entries into the general ledger as well as providing
statutory reports for cash collection activities.

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Insurance
Case Study

Comprehensive Operational Support Driving Growth

The Results
In our first 12 months of operation the improvements have been far reaching;
• Agent Management service levels have improved with turnaround times
for quotes dropping from up to 30 days to a maximum of 4 days.
• Reduced Operational Costs by 40%
• We’ve reduced outstanding account balances for agents from
$9m to $2.5m.
• Audit coverage of Binding Authority Management has moved
from 50% to 100% of agreements.
• Staff attrition across critical areas has been held at a record low of 3%
per annum.

Sutherland Insurance Solutions

To learn more about Sutherland Insurance Solutions, please visit:
www.sutherlandglobal.com/industries_insurance.aspx
or contact:
Bruce Handelman
Insurance Industry Solutions
Office: 585-586-5757 x 2443 | Mobile: 585-967-4628
bruce.handelman@sutherlandglobal.com

Established in 1986, Sutherland Global Services is a global provider of business process and
technology management services offering an integrated portfolio of analytics-driven back-office
and customer facing solutions that support the entire customer lifecycle. It is one of the largest,
independent BPO companies in the world serving global leaders in major industry verticals.
Headquartered in Rochester, N.Y., Sutherland employs more than 30,000 professionals and has
35 operations centers in 13 countries. For more information, visit www.sutherlandglobal.com

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