Underwriting workbench solutions have been around for over 30 years—nearly an eternity in the ever-changing digital landscape. Yet as many underwriters know, unlike the rapid pace of evolution that most technology has seen since, the workbench remains largely unchanged.
These solutions are often inadequate and slow. They reduce productivity, add more administrative burden for underwriters, and end up being just one of many tools that underwriters need to evaluate risk and manage cases rather than a one-stop shop. Even worse, they are difficult to change as technology evolves, growing stale over time as they fail to incorporate the latest automation tools or take a fragmented, unscalable approach to building them.
Appian is changing that with the launch of our new solution for life insurers, Connected Underwriting Life Workbench.
So, what’s different about Appian’s Life Workbench?
It provides a single place to review and manage case data.
Appian’s Life Workbench provides a central location for underwriters to consolidate their work. It removes manual handoffs, increases collaboration and transparency, and, ultimately, improves time to quote.
The solution greatly enhances case management for non-STP cases and improves workflows with automatic case assignment, a dashboard view to prioritize work, and a unified interface that shows all your data in one place.
How do we do it? Thanks to data fabric—a key capability of the underlying Appian Platform—data scattered across and outside of your organization can easily be connected and unified with low-code, meaning you don’t have to deal with headaches that come with migration or complex APIs.
You can use it to automate data ingestion.
With Life Workbench, you can monitor and process incoming applications in real time from multiple channels, including email, web portals, and more.
Because of Appian’s AI capabilities, Life Workbench can automatically extract and classify information from key documents like agent forms, emails, and evidence files. AI document extraction and classification is not only more accurate than entering data by hand, but it also saves hours of precious underwriter time. It lets your best workers focus on more cognitively demanding tasks rather than waste time on tasks better suited to machines.
It integrates with rules engines for faster turnaround times.
Connected Underwriting Life Workbench allows you to connect with third-party sources and has a prebuilt integration to the leading Swiss Re Magnum rules engine. This gives you a complete picture of risk to make better, faster underwriting decisions and speed up policy issuance. It also helps you boost straight-through processing (STP) by leveraging Magnum’s extensive rules library, so simple cases that don’t require human intervention can be processed automatically.
For non-STP cases that require manual intervention, Life Workbench drastically cuts down on time spent ordering and managing requirements. With easy access to organized and consolidated data, underwriters can quickly find the information they need to make more consistent decisions.
Instead of your employees having to manually send out email requests to the MIB, MVR, or Rx providers, Life Workbench does the heavy lifting. When you add a requirement, the application automatically sends a request to the appropriate provider and tracks it by stage from ordered to reviewed. Even unsolicited requirements are surfaced, tracked, and linked to appropriate cases.
Plus, with Appian’s prebuilt connection to Magnum, underwriters can factor in auto-generated suggestions to reduce risk and offer the best terms possible to build loyal, long-term customers.
It’s easy to configure and improves collaboration.
One of the biggest benefits of Life Workbench is that business users can easily configure settings without support from IT. For example, users can quickly create, edit, and share dashboards that present real-time data all without writing any code or relying on IT for setup.
Underwriters can also benefit from increased collaboration without added workload. Instead of relying on emails and chat to communicate status updates, users can add notes and access case history directly in the workbench, saving hours of time spent sifting through emails.
Ready to see it in action?
Join our upcoming webinar with Swiss Re, Reshaping the Future of Life Underwriting, for a deeper dive into the Connected Life Underwriting Workbench solution. Or, contact our team for a custom demo.
