Davies Group
Insurance services provider increases productivity with Hyland's Alfresco platform.
Randall & Quilter Investment Holdings Limited, through its subsidiary, Davies Group, a specialist supplier of insurance services, doubled its Lloyds client base on its binding authority management service in a one-year span. The resulting eight-fold increase in the volume of data and process challenges confronting them meant that the business required a content management platform that would continue to scale with them.
Alfresco platform is required due to data deluge
Davies Group has a team of 400+ insurance professionals based in the U.K., U.S., Bermuda and Europe. It has a wide-ranging service capability and is focused on delivering a competitive, personalized service.
Due to its client’s influx of transactions, most of which were in just the last three months, Davies Group's growing quantity of data was a big challenge. Data standardization was also important — inconsistent file formatting was unstructured and hindered productivity.
Additionally, the company must abide by strict market regulations. Requirements must be fulfilled under Conduct Risk, Pillar 3 (supervisory reporting and disclosure) and Solvency II, enabling insurers to ensure that their delegated authorities are providing complete and accurate data, and are thereby complying to specific protocols.
“We required a future-proof solution that could integrate with our existing equipment, which also enabled us to achieve structured and standardized data paths that abide to the market’s compliance needs,” Davies Group Managing Director Rob Dewen said.
To solve these challenges, Davies Group turned to IT consultant Perspective Technologies, who highly recommended Alfresco Content Services and Alfresco Process Services. The open source nature of the content and process management software gave the flexibility and scale for the company’s growth plans. Other off-the-shelf solutions have a high cost per change request and greater development time, whereas open standards makes it easier to implement modifications to service offerings as required. This enables easy extension and customization, along with the delivery of content management that simplifies the capturing, sharing, integration and retrieval of information across virtual teams.
Employees can now execute their daily tasks more efficiently, with automatically generated document paths that plan, notify and record activity as it happens. Thus, we have seen admin times reduce by up to 20%. We couldn’t manage the volume of data that we do without Alfresco platform, and reliability is never a concern.
Rob Dewen, Managing Director, Davies Group
Productivity increases 20% with Alfresco platform
The Alfresco platform was easily integrated with the company email system, meaning that this information could be automatically pulled into corresponding records. This gave Davies Group instant visibility and management of data received, date filed and by what user, which enables easier auditing. Additionally, any compliance exceptions are sent back to the business user for review.
Davies Group's new streamlined content and workflow processes mean that today, the business has clear oversight for document management and ownership. Also, process flow time has been cut, which has made it easier to manage increased workloads.
"Employees can now execute their daily tasks more efficiently, with automatically generated document paths that plan, notify and record activity as it happens," Dewen said. "Thus, we have seen admin times reduce by up to 20%. We couldn't manage the volume of data that we do without Alfresco platform, and reliability is never a concern."
Since the installation of the new system, the platform has facilitated significant growth. Davies Group has processed more than 130,000 bordereaux files from agency companies, uploaded 12.5 million premiums, claims and risk details, and performed 65 million automated regulatory and compliance checks, 7 million of which were in one month.
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Customer satisfaction gains
Abiding by strict market regulations, Davies Group fulfills its clients’ reporting requirements and ensures employees provide complete and accurate data always to comply. Alfresco platform’s open standards architecture helps to meet these stringent regulatory requirements, with its customizable, secure software that enables effective information governance. Business agility is also improved and ease of auditability achieved.
This has accelerated customer satisfaction, as Davies Group clients have more visibility into performance and now receive enriched standardized data. Additionally, a customer oversight committee is enjoying their afforded input into the future structure and design of the system.
Ultimate business output
This level of data and process transformation has greatly simplified and strengthened information governance and compliance for Davies Group. Its integration with multiple in-house systems ensures a structured workflow, and the open-source model has cost-effective, on-demand scalability that future-proofs the business.