Project Case Study with Jack McIntyre

Project Name

Automated Finance Payment Renewals

Project Overview

This project was carried out for an existing client, who are one of the world’s largest insurers.
The insurer has a daily process on their finance system that automatically renews policies being paid by finance instalments - but there was no process to automatically renew the policies themselves on our ISMIS platform which the Insurer uses for Policy Administration and Distribution.

This project was to automate the process so that renewals would automatically confirm on ISMIS when processed on the payment system.

Project Involvement

The insurer’s system already had a daily extract of the policies that had auto renewed on the finance system, so we were tasked with designing a solution that would take this extract and automate the process on our side.

To do this I had to design and build a new micro-service, which would run on a scheduled basis to:
• Automatically pick up the extract from a secure location
• Carry out a series of validation checks on each of the policies to ensure there were no issues with offering a renewal (e.g. checking the policy has not been cancelled, flagging any underwriting rules which might mean the renewal needs to be reviewed before issue etc).
• Process all valid renewals automatically so that they are transacted and bound on the policy administration system.
• Email the insurer’s operations team to flag any validation issues with the policies, so that they can follow up on the payment system to make any changes required.

Overall benefit to the customer?

Various Operation teams within the Insurer had the responsibility of running manual daily checks on ISMIS to see if the policies were due to lapse. They would then have to manually renew them. Having an automated process saves time.

Using an automated system improves process efficiency in terms of getting the data onto our system and notifying the client of any validation issues in an exceptions report.

Also having an automated process with policy validation can help reduce the chance of data integrity issues.

What I found interesting as part of the project?

The project required writing a new micro-service from scratch, which is always interesting. However, to ensure code reuse, reduce cost and save time in delivery for the client, the new service triggers calls to the existing ISMIS functions.

These are the same functions that would be used by a human to do the same activity in a manual renewal scenario. I found it interesting to write a new program that interfaces with the existing web pages in that way.