The Challenge
Reducing Operational Expenses While Improving Resilience
This large Life and Annuities Insurer writes an array of income and asset protection products from Term to Universal-Life, aggregating $5.7 billion in GWP for 2022. They work with independent agents, brokers, and affinity partners to deliver innovative products and coverage for a wide array of needs.
They were also growing fast. After 59 inorganic acquisitions, this L&A Insurer inherited a lot of operational and technological complexity, with portfolios spread across 20+ legacy platforms. This resulted in inconsistent delivery, long turnaround times, process duplication, and growing backlogs. Processes were time-consuming and performed across different systems, due to paper-based customer requests and overly manual work practices.
The Insurer was looking to aggressively streamline, standardize, and digitize its operations to improve efficiency, drive cost-competitiveness, and enhance experiences for both policyholders and agents.
Outcome
Scaled Automation and Aggregation into More Standardized Operations and Tangible Results
Sutherland was engaged early in the insurer’s high-growth journey, and it has developed into a partnership of 15 years and counting. We proactively addressed their challenges and adopted an agile, transformative, and holistic approach to help evolve their operating model.
Sutherland integrated several acquisitions to streamline operations across new business, underwriting support, policy administration, servicing, and claims. Through a unique and agile framework built with human-centric design, we standardized and consolidated process value chains, achieving consistency in customer service metrics.
A greenfield of digital service centers covered back-office and customer-facing functions. Sutherland integrated and supported the migration of several portfolios onto target platforms –remodeling engagement on a ‘per transaction’ commercial framework. This transferred all operational risk to Sutherland while delivering cost predictability and boosting efficiency to the client.
All major workflows across new business, underwriting, servicing, and claims were digitized using the Sutherland Robility and Sutherland SUL solutions. This streamlined processing and drove tangible business outcomes like scalability, cost optimization, and speed to market.
