Leading Insurer Modernizes Payment Operations with TotalAgility & Genus Technologies

Leading Insurer Eliminates Manual Check Processing by Moving Up to Tungsten TotalAgility

This leading insurer protects customers across North America. Many customers prefer to pay for their policies by mailing checks, which created substantial manual data-entry work for the insurer. To solve the challenge and accelerate deposits, the insurer turned to its long-term technology partner and certified Move Up consultant Genus Technologies to upgrade to TotalAgility. The new automated process enables the company to process checks six-times faster while eliminating hours of work – delivering full return on investment in under two years. 

Challenge

This leading insurer offers a wide range of products to help protect customers across the U.S. and Canada. While the insurer offers customers the option of sending documentation and payments via digital channels, many prefer to send physical checks to pay their premiums. This created a significant amount of manual processing work for the business.

For many years, the insurer used Tungsten Capture to help extract information from inbound documents and bring the data into its business systems. However, processing customer payments still relied heavily on manual data entry.

“Our customers submit a variety of paperwork to us, including policy payments, and we routinely assign temporary staff to process them,” says a spokesperson for the insurer. “Our teams needed to re-key the checks a minimum of three times to process the payment, which increased the risk of human error. Moreover, the continual need to hire and train temporary members of staff was a substantial cost driver. Processing the payments took many hours of manual work each year.”

With its legacy accounting platform approaching the end of life, the insurer saw an opportunity for a fresh approach to check processing. “We wanted to make check processing more consistent and less labor-intensive, allowing our employees to focus on more engaging and meaningful work,” says the spokesperson. “Our many years of success with Tungsten Automation convinced us that automation was the way forward.”

SOLUTION

The insurer approached its long-term technology partner Genus Technologies to help automate check processing. A Tungsten Titanium Partner with over 25 years of experience, Genus Technologies helped the company transform its approach by moving up from Tungsten Capture to Tungsten TotalAgility.

John Peters, Account Manager at Genus Technologies, says: “While Tungsten Capture had served the insurer well, it lacked the workflow capabilities they needed for this project. TotalAgility offers support for content-heavy workflow automation straight out the box, as well as strong security and compliance capabilities and a full audit trail.”

The spokesperson for the insurer adds: “We felt confident that TotalAgility would evolve with us and would be easy to maintain in the long term.” A certified TotalAgility Move Up consultant with more than 20 successful upgrades, Genus Technologies brought a proven methodology to the project. The company worked closely with the insurer’s IT and check processing teams to help deploy TotalAgility, develop the new integrations and workflows, and coordinate training and change management activities.

Streamlining check processing into one automated workflow, the new solution enables a single member of staff to scan in paper checks. TotalAgility automatically captures the key data and performs validation checks to match each payment to the correct policy. Via an integration with Deposit21, the solution transmits each check image to the insurer’s bank and stores a digital copy with the insurer for long-term retention.

To enable a seamless transition to the new way of working, the insurer ran the former manual process and new automated workflow in parallel during the final third of the project. This allowed the company to train its teams and to validate the accuracy and reliability of the solution.

“The Genus Technologies team is great at listening and always willing to share recommendations and best practices,” says the spokesperson. “It’s a true partnership. Whenever we work with Genus Technologies, we always feel confident that they will be there to support us, no matter what.”

RESULTS

With TotalAgility streamlining and automating check processing, the insurer has eliminated the need to recruit and train temporary workers to carry out the work manually. Today, a lean team can handle the process with ease: saving many hours each year.

“Previously, it took up to 20 people to handle check processing,” says the spokesperson. “Working with Genus Technologies, we configured TotalAgility to automatically match 90% of paper checks to the correct policies with only five full-time employees. The entire end-to-end process, including taking the check out of the envelope and scanning it in, takes less than a minute: six-times faster than before.”

The Tungsten Automation solution also makes it fast and simple to process the small number of checks that cannot be automatically matched to policies.

“In the past, matching up payments was often a time-consuming process that involved deep-dives into our mainframe environment,” explains the spokesperson. “Today, our teams can do all the necessary research to match checks with payments without ever leaving  TotalAgility. Even during our busiest periods, we can submit checks to the bank on the same day we receive them: a full 24 hours faster than before.”

Through full integration with Deposit21, the Tungsten solution equips the insurer’s finance team with granular, real-time reporting. “TotalAgility makes our accounting, reporting and reconciliation processes cleaner and easier,” says the spokesperson. “Built-in treasury reporting capabilities in TotalAgility are particularly useful, as re-writing our legacy treasury platform to extract that data would have been complex and costly. Improved visibility of deposits also reduces the risk of policies lapsing because of late payments, which helps enhance the customer experience.”

Crucially, TotalAgility provides a full audit trail. “We have a complete record of who did what and when,” confirms the spokesperson. “Moving to a digital process eliminates the need for us to retain paper copies of checks, which helps reduce our physical storage costs. TotalAgility will also allow us to use the latest AI capabilities to automate other document-heavy processes in the future.”

"Moving up to TotalAgility is not just about delivering improvements to document capture; it can unlock a wealth of new possibilities and use cases, especially around AI."

- Jimar Garcia, Director of Solutions & Innovation, Genus Technologies

SUMMARY

Now in its second year of using TotalAgility, the insurer has already achieved a full return on investment. Building on this success, the insurer and Genus Technologies are exploring new automation opportunities to enhance customer experience and efficiency.

Jimar Garcia, Director of Solutions and Innovation at Genus Technologies, comments: “Moving up to TotalAgility is not just about delivering improvements to document capture; it can unlock a wealth of new possibilities and use cases, especially around AI. As our project with this leading insurer shows, moving to a modern automation platform can transform the way we work.”

The spokesperson for the insurer concludes: “We’re looking forward to working with Genus Technologies to explore how we can use Tungsten Automation solutions to digitize other paper-based processes.”