With insurance companies under increasing pressure not only to comply with new and evolving legislation, but also to prove they are complying, managing authorities is a more important aspect of risk management than ever before. Authority Hub is designed to help insurers deal with the challenges they face in managing and governing underwriting, claims and non-insurance authorities.
Here are 10 problems it can help to solve:
1.
Insurers dont' have full visibility of their risk exposure
Given the ever more complex nature of how and where business is written, it’s essential that insurance organisations have visibility of their total exposure and where authority limits are (and aren’t) being adhered to. But this can be costly and is challenging to do.
Authority Hub gives the business clear visibility of claim payment and underwriting limits, and shows where financial risk tolerance lies and even where expense authorities are distributed across the business. This helps prevent breaches, and can also help to maximise the business written by transferring capacity that is not being used.
2.
Evidence compliance is labour-intensive
Constant changes in legislation and growing penalties for non-compliance have driven insurers to put in place labour-intensive processes to gather, monitor and manage key controls such as authority limits.
3.
Managing authorities is expensive
Given the complexity involved, managing authorities using manual processes typically incurs large administrative overheads for insurance organisations.
Authority Hub keeps costs down by automating the creation, amendment and management of delegated authorities.
4.
End users don't have access to up-to-date information about authorities
Those responsible for adhering to authority limits in underwriting, claims and other areas of the business are often reliant on out-of-date, paper-based authority information.
Authority Hub gives access to up-to-date information about authorities at any time, helping end users to reduce the risk of an authority breach.
5.
There is no central store of authority limits
Claims limits, underwriting limits and non-insurance limits are often held in multiple silos, systems and spreadsheets. This can lead to duplication, inconsistencies and, ultimately, increased risk of non-compliance.
With Authority Hub, insurers can manage underwriting, claims and non-insurance authorities, all in a single location. It acts as a single source of truth, and is accurate, visible and searchable for end users, ensuring everyone knows the limits they should be working to.
6.
It's hard to keep track of delegating hierarchies
It’s important for leaders to have an overview of the spread of authority throughout the organisation’s hierarchy; lack of visibility, and therefore control, of who can write which volume and type of business increases the chance of a breach of an authority.
Authority Hub makes the process of managing sophisticated delegation hierarchies easy. Any change only needs to be made once; Authority Hub will cascade it down the authority hierarchy automatically. Leaders can have a clear picture of all delegated authorities given to other people and reassign authority hierarchy from one employee to another with the click of a button.
7.
Applying new rules is time-consuming
Applying new rating rules, or updating existing ones, across a range of product lines is complicated and takes a long time, because they are generally embedded in legacy systems, Excel spreadsheets, Word documents or a combination of all of these.
With Authority Hub, it’s easy to design sophisticated and complicated delegated authority letters with multiple sections and save them as templates so that they be reused in the future without having to be set up multiple times. Authority changes can then be made quickly and automatically cascaded across the entire organisational hierarchy.
8.
Queries about authorities, and the responses to them, are hard to keep track of
Typically, if an individual has a query about a particular authority, they will submit it to the relevant person via email – a time-consuming process, and one that is difficult to track, given the number of queries that can arise across a large organisation.
Authority Hub enables insurers to deal with queries around delegated authorities efficiently. It has an in-built collaboration tool that allows users, delegators and administrators to mark up authority letters with comments, all of which are tracked.
9.
Authority management is difficult to integrate with HR information
With a manual system, it’s hard to keep track of authority holders, especially in a large organisation. For example, every time an authority holder leaves the company, that fact has to be separately notified, as does the identity of the replacement authority holder.
With Authority Hub, this isn’t an issue. It seamlessly integrates with HR systems and can automate the creation and revocation of authorities.
10.
Digitising authority management demands a lot of internal IT teams
CTOs typically find it challenging to work with stakeholders to drive digital transformation projects, constrained as they are in terms of budgets and time.
