NIIT Technologies Insurance Technologies helps Atrium Streamline Risk Entry with Business Process Outsourcing

The global commercial insurance industry continues to evolve at a rapid pace with the emergence of new markets, escalating competition, and an increasingly complex trading environment. This development is driving the growing need for insurance organizations to improve underwriting ratios, while keeping operational costs and combined ratios to a minimum.

In 2008, Atrium wanted to make its risk entry process as streamlined and efficient as possible. It wanted to ensure that its underwriting team had enough time to assess the quality of the risk presented, especially during key renewal times. Having considered a number of different options for managing its risk entry, including hiring a pool of new administrative staff and employing additional home workers, Atrium decided that the best option would be to pilot an outsourcing project. “It was never a case of ‘it’s broken, let’s fix it’ with our previous method of risk entry. We simply wanted to find a way to do it better, faster and more cost-effectively”, says Jason Townshend, Head of Syndicate Management and Reporting at Atrium. “We saw outsourcing as a potential way to relieve the pressure on our underwriting team and allow it to get on with higher-value work.”

Atrium chose NITL’s Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) service, based on its existing relationship with the company. Already familiar with NITL’s insurance knowledge and expertise, Atrium felt the BPO service would provide quick, competent and efficient handling of its risk entry and query resolution. Cost was a compelling factor in selecting NITL against other competitive offerings

Business Need

Since the inception of engagement, NITL has provided the following BPO services to Atrium:

Risk EntryAll risk details are entered into a policy administration system. This includes quotes, promises, declinature slips, covers, binders, declarations, front sheets, and endorsements. The Business Process Migration Management Methodology (BPM3), a unique implementation practice developed by NITL to reduce the perceived risk involved with outsourcing a process, was implemented for Atrium’s Syndicate 609 and was rolled out in three phases.

Phase One:NITL’s BPO team worked together with Atrium’s underwriting team to record the company’s entry process for its Aviation book of business. Knowledge transfer to the BPO team was a fundamental part of this phase.

Phase Two:The BPO team conducted three QC checks at different stages of the workflow. By the end of the first three months, 95 percent accuracy was achieved.

Business Solution

Atrium Underwriters Ltd (Atrium) manages

and underwrites insurance and reinsurance

exclusively at Lloyd’s of London. Atrium was

formed in 1998 by merging two of Lloyd’s

leading businesses. It is a high quality

managing agency in the market today. It

manages and commits capital to two of

Lloyd’s leading syndicates - 570 and 609,

and its underwriting capacity for 2011 was

£420 million.

We were reassured by our first steps into risk entry

outsourcing. Considerable responsibilities remained

with our staff, especially during the first few months

of the transfer, but the BPO has resulted in a net

benefit owing to the reallocation of the workload. In

some cases, we also took the opportunity to capture

more information than we did before,” says Simon

Cooper, Chief Operating Officer at Atrium. He added

“A good measure of progress is that, since the initial

pilot, other classes of business have also been

successfully outsourced.

Simon CooperChief Operating Officer, Atrium

The Client

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CASE STUDY

Insurance

CASE STUDY

Business BenefitsAtrium has gained significantly from its engagement with NITL - with improved efficiency, productivity and low costs. The accuracy service levels for Atrium’s Aviation, Marine, Cargo, Fine Art and Specie, Liability, Space, and Terrorism book of business, for instance, reached an average of above 99.6 percent in the year 2010. The average turnaround time does not exceed one working day at the BPO center. Furthermore, Atrium’s outsourced book of business classes had a typical average turnaround time of 5.5 hours for the year 2010. Once the implementation process was embedded, Atrium’s underwriting team spent less time dealing with risk entry issues, and instead, began to focus on higher-value work. The staff can dedicate more time on assessing the quality of risks before binding, carrying out contract certainty checks and assessing the pricing of risks presented. Some of the other benefits that Atrium realizes from its relationship with NITL are:

- There is a local point of contact: All client correspondence takes place with the BPO management team based in London.

- All query escalation management is done by the BPO team: This is undertaken through Atrium’s workflow system and has led to a reduction in overall transaction turnaround time. All query escalations go through two levels of checks in India, leading to a further reduction in the percentage of queries being escalated.

- Regular and rigorous reviews: Manuals for each business class are reviewed, with a subsequent sign-off from Atrium underwriters and immediate implementation of changes.

- Industry knowledge: All NITL BPO staff are trained and tested in London Market insurance and reinsurance processes. All offshore BPO staff have to mandatorily possess a degree.

- Internationally recognized accreditation: NITL’s BPO center is COPC (Customer Operations Performance Certified), CMMI (Capability Maturity Model Integration) and PCCM (People Capability Maturity Model) certified.

- Guaranteed data security: NITL’s BPO center operates in a maximum security environment, ensuring data security at all times. The BPO center holds ISO 27001 certificate for information security.

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Phase Three:After the second phase of implementation, Atrium was completely confident of the new process. At this stage Atrium was initially conducting 100 percent QC checks on the completed entries. This was gradually reduced once the underwriting team became more comfortable with the process as accuracy levels started exceeding 98 percent. By the end of six months, Atrium felt confident of sampling just 15 percent of finished entries for QC.

After laying the ground work and completing the implementation for the first book of business, Atrium’s second class of business, Marine Property, took only a month and a half to implement. “We were happy with the implementation process, everything went largely according to plan,” comments Jason Townshend. “Our underwriting team has been impressed by the levels of accuracy and turnaround time delivered by NITL’s BPO team.” Currently, Atrium syndicate 609 is using NITL’s BPO Service for Aviation, Cargo, Fine Art and Specie, Liability, Marine, Space, and Terrorism. “Introduction of Atrium’s Work Distribution system further helped synchronize monitoring of work at both ends, leading to improved turnaround time and overall co-ordination for transactions with each business class underwriter. The daily and monthly reports generated by the workflow helped the BPO team set higher targets. The great collaboration taking place between our underwriting team and NITL’s BPO team made way for synchronization that made this process a success”, Jason adds.

The risk entry process was initially directed by NITL’s London based BPO team, which constituted experienced insurance staff supported by a team of professionals in Delhi, NCR. Eventually, with time, the expertise of the BPO team improved, leading to offshoring of the NITL QC role and the implementation of the “Dual QC” model. Making use of both levels of insurance knowledge the team is now able to answer a considerable percentage of queries without interrupting the Atrium staff. The current risk entry process is governed by an SLA, which requires that the process is completed within one working day.

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