Helping insurance giant Scottish American become slicker, sharper and primed for growth.
The client
With 11 offices across the United States, Scottish American is a leading insurance company focused on investing in, actively managing and growing privately held insurance distribution businesses including Managing General Agents (MGAs) and brokers.
The challenge
In line with their customer focus, Scottish American prides itself on offering some of the fastest turnaround times in the market. They have invested heavily in both technology and people to achieve this goal, and approached Box UK to undertake a bespoke software development project to design and build a brand-new application that would streamline the process of managing policy submissions. As the US commercial insurance industry is highly regulated, with communications between agents, MGAs and carriers strictly monitored, any proposed solution would need to support all necessary compliance standards while ensuring policy requests could be processed as efficiently as possible.
The application would replace Scottish American’s existing legacy system; no longer well-supported, this system prevented the organisation from making vital technical updates, and as such scalability and extensibility were primary considerations for the project. In particular it was vital that the new platform support future bespoke development work that would enable Scottish American to better serve their customers, as well as support their objective of disrupting the commercial insurance market through the introduction of innovative new processes and techniques.
Our solution
Box UK’s analysts began by working closely with Scottish American to build an understanding of the commercial insurance industry and capture the regulations and restrictions that must be adhered to by insurance providers. Out of this bespoke software consultancy phase came a list of requirements that guided the design and development of custom web application BindHQ. Providing a central system in which to store all policy details, this solution allowed Scottish American to easily access and manage enquiries from agents, along with responses from carriers and any additional updates and communications.
To manage the client’s complex accounting requirements Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system NetSuite was integrated into the application by Box UK’s developers; as a best-of-breed financial management solution this provided Scottish American with enhanced accounting and reporting capabilities.
To guarantee the accuracy of this financial information Box UK also had to undertake a migration of all accounting data from the legacy system to the new application. With over 17 million files, including one and a half million existing policies, a detailed research phase was needed to assess the quality of the data and ensure it was in a format appropriate for successful transition between systems. From this research our analysts identified a number of essential activities that needed to be performed such as cleansing data to enable fields to be validated, converting date and time information to a consistent format and resolving encryption issues caused by the age of the existing system.
Working closely with the client as well as drawing on their own domain knowledge, our team was able to make informed decisions as to the management of this data, and once all necessary considerations had been addressed an implementation plan was put in place to ensure that the migration did not affect Scottish American’s operations.
The application was built with Scottish American’s requirement for innovation as a foremost concern; employing industry best practices and coding standards to ensure that the system supported seamless integration with additional features, tools and data sources as required.
The outcome
BindHQ provides Scottish American with a high-performance solution for the management of their core business processes. Importantly, the application offers a stable, secure platform for future expansion and Box UK is continuing to extend the product; from the development of custom APIs to integrate with leading carriers and facilitate instant quotations, to the creation of a bespoke broker portal that will allow agents to upload their details directly to the application and more.
Through this functionality Scottish American will be able to replace lengthy email-based communications with much shorter, integrated feedback loops, significantly increasing the efficiency with which they can process applications and thus enabling them to deliver an increased number of policies and drive revenue generation. Additionally, by removing their outdated legacy system they have delivered large savings on their server bills and can react quickly to changing conditions and demands.
Key services
