5 tips to develop brilliant insurance policy management software
According to the latest global trends, insurance policy management software can cut administrative costs in the insurance sector by replacing legacy systems with modern user-friendly solutions. For better policy administration, companies will focus on investing in new technology products.
What is actually insurance policy management?
Policy administration is a multitasking process. It ensures that all the coverages are timely renewed. It provides tools for accurate quoting, creating policies, binding, etc. Simply put, it’s an end-to-end process of managing insurance contracts.
What does a typical insurance policy administration process look like?
Insurance management workflow may vary across providers of P&C coverage or life and health coverage. Generally, it includes the following tasks:
- Resources Management
- Licensing
- Quoting
- Data Sharing
- Loss Runs Requests
- Proposals Generation
- Underwriting
- Rewriting
- Renewal
- Cancellation
- Reinsurance
Basically, here’s what you can do: issue, change, reverse, update, change, create. Each activity requires an established workflow and relevant participants.
What is insurance policy management software?
If you are looking for the best insurance underwriting software, you need to learn about the core features of such systems. As a rule, your choice will depend on what you actually need. A set of core features or a set of unique modules built exclusively to meet your business needs. Below are the basic components of policy administration solutions:
Quoting
Modules for quotes help carriers estimate correctly what a person’s rate could be. The right quoting can be insured by collecting as much relevant information about the potential policyholder as possible. Quotes and premiums offered by insurance providers are also based on some statistics data provided by underwriting departments.
Policy issuance
This feature is a must for all MGAs and other carriers. It allows for generating different types of policy-related documents like custom forms, business rules, corporate/personal lines forms, etc. Besides, it’s possible to integrate this feature with third-party apps to effectively use data. Usually, such tools provide the opportunity to import data of different formats.
Renewals
The renewals feature helps carriers notify policyholders about the need to renew their coverage a few weeks prior to the due date. Usually, insured people are able to renew their policy online. The process is quick and simple. Typically, users are to enter some of their credentials to access their accounts. All other information is already available there, so a person has no need to communicate with an agent.
Claims management
Modules for processing claims help automate a complete claims life cycle. Bespoke solutions usually offer advanced options for managing requests. Different functionalities can be built according to the company’s workflows. Claims management is one of the core processes in the P&C sector, life insurance, health insurance, and employee benefits area. Thus, it must be paid due attention to captives.
Servicing
With an intuitive solution for insurance servicing, agents are able to easily manage customer requests and respond to them quickly. Insurance providers can easily make changes, provide information, process documents, provide recipes, etc.
Need a custom solution for the insurance industry? Check out our overview of management software
What’s better: Custom or ready-made insurance policy management software?
When it comes to choosing the best insurance software, customers have two alternatives. To build a bespoke system from scratch. Or to buy an off-the-shelf product. Both options have advantages and disadvantages. Let’s compare the two options.
Out-of-the-box insurance systems cost lower than custom solutions. They are available immediately for implementation. However, unlike with bespoke products, you will have to pay annual or monthly fees to use ready-made apps.
Open source insurance policy management software provides many core features. Unfortunately, often customers don’t need as many functions as the software provides. But instead, they may require some specific features to meet their business goals. It’s possible with bespoke solutions. Before the project development phase, analysts conduct a feasibility analysis to define the main challenges and make up a list of requirements.
Custom policy administration systems are more scalable and flexible. For example, in Diceus, we build insurance software with regard to the constantly growing number of users. We also take into account the increasing number of new products developed by carriers.
Case 1: Build insurance underwriting software from scratch
Let’s start with a typical development life cycle. You’ll need this information if you plan to get a custom app. Here’s how it works:
- You provide your on-site or offshore team with major requirements for the project.
- Based on your request for a proposal, a dedicated team will give you detailed technical design specifications.
- Once you approve an SRS document, a team will be able to start developing a project.
- In terms of Agile development, a team provides testing and quality assurance services to ensure that the product is fully functional and free of bugs.
- The developed solution can be further integrated with third-party applications and implemented on the client’s site.
- The last checkpoint is support and maintenance. The dedicated team is able to deliver highly scalable products and provide 24/7 support.
Need custom insurance software developers? DICEUS has a great experience in building insurtech solutions.
Case 2: Transform your policy management
If your system still requires manual efforts, think of digital transformation. DICEUS provides professional services to change your legacy software. Here’s how it works:
- Tell us about the existing system. We discuss all the current problems you have. You tell us what you want to see in a modernized version.
- Our business analysts conduct research on what changes your system needs.
- We provide a list of new requirements for the project along with deliverables and specifications.
- After approval, our developers start working on the project.
- We test every module or feature to ensure high performance and data accuracy.
- Our engineers deliver and implement fully compatible policy management software.
How to better generate leads with health insurance quoting software?
Quality checklist: What should a good insurance policy management software do?
With up and running insurance system, its owners and users will be able to get a lot of benefits.
Benefit 1 – Enhance efficiency by automating policy management
Straight-through processing is one of the main focuses of any insurance company. Implementing OCR tools and turning papers into electronic documents will help you organize data in the most efficient way. Chat and voice bots can improve the customer experience.
Benefit 2 – Simplify policy administration
Good policy administration software can rid you of highly repetitive processes. For example, RPA (robotic process automation) tools can help you automate different tasks in document management.
Benefit 3 – Enable a faster market-seeking strategy
Modern underwriting systems allow for effective product development and rapid market entry for new insurance products. Newly created products are easily defined within a standardized framework.
Benefit 4 – Empower your system with better compliance
Modernized insurance systems and the most sophisticated policy administration products ensure regulatory compliance with data gathering and operating workflows.
Benefit 5 – Improve cost-effectiveness
Current technology offers intelligent solutions to manage different tasks remotely. For example, advanced policy management software can be developed for mobiles. Mobile corporate solutions allow employees to give a timely response to customers or access the right information from any place and at any time.
5 Tips to choose the best software used by insurance companies
Picking up the right software is always a daunting task. Here are some tips for selecting the best-suited software package for your agency.
Tip 1 – Learn about different alternatives
First off, you should start with market research. You should know about the different options offered in the software market. Traditionally, software used by insurance companies is divided into off-the-shelf products, suites, and custom software. Off-the-shelf systems and apps which serve as a part of larger suites often offer basic features. Custom apps are usually more specialized.
Tip 2 – Make a list of your demands
A well-structured list of requirements for the software will help you greatly. Firstly, you’ll discover for yourself exactly what you actually need. Secondly, you’ll know what end-users need. Secondly, you’ll have a list of initial requirements for potential vendors. Based on your list, they can provide you with specifications. If that is found to be insufficient, they can conduct a deeper business analysis to detect the company’s needs.
Tip 3 – Look for reliable vendors
Your next step will be to find a trusted software engineering company or a dedicated team. We recommend searching for vendors on verified platforms like Clutch or Good Firms. There, you’ll be able to read about the form’s history, focus industries, and number of employees. Besides, you’ll find some information about the technologies used by developers. And finally, portfolios. You can look through various projects that were accomplished by a company.
Tip 4 – Double-check all the deliverables
Once you signed an agreement, check if you have all the functionalities and features in the list of project deliverables. Did you include policy administration, claims management, and communication management? What about other functionalities? Intuitive design, user-friendly interface, and mobile app. You should discuss all these things beforehand.
Tip 5 – Communicate with your team
If you made up your mind to create an application from scratch, you would probably choose a dedicated team to cooperate with. Dedicated teams work best for long-term projects. This model is good if you plan to make any changes. If you choose dedicated developers, you should keep in touch with them regularly. Define the best-suited means of communication and project management to timely track the project progress.
Read more about life insurance quoting software that every agent must have.
DICEUS Insurtech Case
One of our focus industries is insurance that’s why we’d like to add some helpful information about our latest case to this article. It will help you get familiar with how custom development works for the insurance market.
We developed the Insubiz solution for our technology partner who specialized in delivering state-of-the-art software to captives, agents, brokers, and other insurance product providers.
Our key goal was to create a platform able to simplify and streamline administrative tasks and processes. To realize this goal, we created a detailed roadmap that included the following components:
- Technology roadmap
- Clear communication
- Professional project management
- Risk management
As a result, our developers managed to build a system that offers clients effective coverage and cuts operational costs. The final product incorporates different features that can manage risks, claims, policies, and incidents. It can also control the budget, track data, make reports, and manage workflows.
The system was developed according to the L&F (look and feel) approach to design. We tried to consider all principles of user-friendly interfaces and intuitive design. Our team consisted of 10 experts, including a project manager, back-end developers, front-end developers, and test engineers.
If you want to learn more about insurtech solutions and custom development, feel free to ask our experts. They can answer your questions, recommend the best-suited technology, and consult on modernization. Besides, we have long experience in creating sophisticated systems for different industries from scratch. We are ready to offer you the most professional, dedicated team for your business domain.
