| MAIN BENEFICTS
Safira’s Risk Bid Management focal point is to increase the Quality of service in the risk product’s sale process, encompassing all involved parties (Banks, Insurance Companies and Health Service Provider Companies).
Zero information gaps
One of the major staler on a multi-company business process is information gaps on key information, resulting in several phone calls, e-mails and faxes, back and forward, along the whole chain, so that processes can flow. Safira’s Risk Bid Management addresses this problem and ensures that the risk products sale process doesn’t get along the chain without all parties contributing with all required key information.
Automated approval processes
When processing risk proposals, another bottleneck (and cost center) resides on the risk analyst pool, usually are required to analyze all proposals. With Safira’s Risk Bid Management, Insurance Companies will define thresholds based on customer’s information (e.g. health surveys, credit amounts, cumulative amounts, amongst others), risk product limits and reinsurance limits, and thus proposals can be automatically accepted and/or refused. A similar automatic decisional process is used when receiving medical exam results. Automated approval processes based on business rules are a key factor on the increase of the Quality of Service, and the usage of expensive risk analyst time. Risk analysts will focus their skills on difficult, off-limits or ambiguous proposals.
Automated choosing of medical exams
PFor different risk products and customer characteristics (e.g. health surveys, credit amounts, age), Safira’s Risk Bid Management can determine the proper set of medical examinations required, creating standard, predefined, formal requests to the Health Service Provider Companies, choosing the company that best serves the customer – business criteria applies, such as geographical proximity and medical examination capabilities. The standardization on examination results is also a key factor that the solution enforces, allowing these results to feed the automated approval processes (described before).
Definition, enforcement and control of Service Levels
An absolute key factor on Quality of Service is the proper definition of Service Levels. Safira’s Risk Bid Management enforces the establishment of Service Levels, for all parties involved in the sale of insurance risk products, and for all relevant concepts of the sale process (e.g., time to deliver type X medical exam results in region Y). Although Service Level violation can trigger from alerts to key users to full automatic responses or alternate process routing amongst parties, the Safira’s Risk Bid Management also allows key users to monitor the process flows and retrieve statistical information regarding all parties’ compliance to the Service Level Agreement (SLA) – we can’t stress this enough: in the sale process, if one party violates the SLA the overall Quality of Service is compromised, and that impacts directly on customer satisfaction.
Integration and automation
Last, but no least, the Safira’s Risk Bid Management solution integrates directly with all parties Line of Business Systems, through open standards, such as Web Services, in a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). The usual scenario has tree parties: A Bank with a Credit Workflow system, handling all the credit process except the cross selling of insurance risk products (e.g. Life Insurance required for Mortgage Loans); An Insurance Company with a mainframe Line of Business System, willing to use the Bank’s branch network to cross sell risk products; and a Health Service Provider Company (or network) with a small server Line of Business System, that can provide medical exams required to fully assess insurance risk proposals. Safira’s Risk Bid Management integration projects create interfaces with all these heterogeneous systems, defining all business message flows required to fully automate the end-to-end sale process, in a comprehensive business-to-business process, and thus replacing human (slow and error prone) input of all data flows between parties.
CASE STUDY
Safira’s Risk Bid Management has been successfully deployed at BES-Vida Insurance Company (ex TRANQUILIDADE-Vida), establishing a full B2B sale process with Banco Espírito Santo Group and the Health Service Provider Esumédica. This solution was successfully deployed in August of 2004, and is today a remarkable case study, as shown in the following key performance indicators taken in September of 2005.
| KPI |
% |
| Risk proposals having information gaps |
0% |
| Risk proposals requiring medical exams |
9,7% |
| Risk proposals with automatic approval (acceptance or rejection) |
61% |
| Risk proposals with fast decision (< 24h) |
40% |
| Clear definition of Service Levels for each responsibility and involved party |
100% |
| Number of fully integrated business transactions, involving all parties in the global Mortgage Loan sale process |
100% |
Source: BES-Vida
Analyzing BES-Vida’s business in a two year period, comparing the year before deploying Safira’s Financial B2B (Sep/03 – Jul/04), with the year after that deployment (Sep/04 – Jul/05), very impressive results come to light, as shown bellow.
| KPI |
Before |
After |
Variation |
| Risk proposals tracked |
N/A |
40.879 |
N/A |
| Accepted risk proposals (business volume) |
18.323
1.200 M€ |
22.425
1.500 M€ |
+ 22%
+ 24% |
| Automatically accepted risk proposals |
0 |
13.630 |
N/A |
| Sales effectiveness |
N/A |
55% |
N/A |
Source: BES-Vida |