Self-Service Web Portal to Transform Specialty Commercial Insurance Workflows

About Our Client

The Client is a Canadian managing general agent (MGA) focused on underwriting and claim services for specialty commercial insurance, including general liability, professional indemnity, property, and surplus lines. The company offers insurance programs for the marine, energy, transportation, construction, and manufacturing industries.

Manual Insurance Operations Needed Urgent Automation

The Client used to rely on in-person visits, emails, phone calls, and requests via website forms to capture specialty insurance applications and claims. For the company’s teams, this meant time-intensive manual aggregation and processing of omnichannel inquiries. The need to manually communicate progress to customers and partners further burdened the MGA’s employees and slowed down servicing processes. Insureds, brokers, and agents were facing the same friction, which, over time, led to lower customer and partner satisfaction levels.

To combat this, the Client decided to implement an insurance portal that would let business customers, brokers, and agents file insurance applications and claims, access coverage documents, and track MGA service progress independently. The portal was to provide automation and collaborative features for quicker and more efficient servicing workflows.

The Client lacked in-house software development and IT project management competencies and needed a reliable tech partner to implement its specialty insurance portal end-to-end. Trusting ScienceSoft’s decades-long experience in web portal development and engineering custom insurance solutions, the MGA commissioned the project to our team.

End-to-End Development of a Specialty Insurance Web Portal

ScienceSoft’s insurance IT consultant held a series of interview sessions with the Client’s stakeholders to elicit their requirements for the portal. Our expert also discovered the needs of the portal’s target users and interviewed the Client’s underwriters and claims specialists to grasp the operating issues stemming from the lack of self-service options. As a result, the consultant composed a detailed functional specification for the solution.

ScienceSoft’s architect designed the portal’s architecture to be scalable, highly accessible, and secure to support the company-wide shift to online document exchange and future business growth. The Client wanted the portal to be integrated with its specialty insurance management system, which handled automated underwriting and claim processing, and the expert suggested cost-effective ways to do this. Our architect chose a modern, easy-to-maintain tech stack to maximize the portal’s useful life and optimize maintenance expenses.

Next, ScienceSoft’s UX/UI designer analyzed the needs of focus user groups (business customers, brokers, agents) and created UX wireframes and a UI kit for the portal. The designer opted for clear, intuitive layouts to ensure smooth user journeys and high adoption.

After the portal’s design was approved by the Client, ScienceSoft moved to the implementation stage. Our team handled the entire portal development process, from back-end coding and UI development to testing to solution deployment. The team also integrated the portal with the Client’s insurance management system.

With the new portal delivered by ScienceSoft, the Client gained access to the following functionality:

Self-service features for customers, brokers, and agents

• Self-onboarding, adding and updating business and personal information via profiles on the portal.
• Template-based generation of applications and claims across various specialty commercial lines: marine insurance, energy insurance, commercial property insurance, general liability insurance, E&O insurance, etc.
• Independent estimation of premiums for standard coverage options using an online calculator.
• Instant access to specialty insurance documents: core contracts, quotes, policies, certificates of insurance, claim settlement letters, and more.
• Tracking the current application processing and claim resolution statuses, due premium payments, and policy active dates.
• Live messaging to communicate with underwriting and claims professionals.

Insurance automation features

• Automated transfer of quote requests, coverage applications, and claims from the portal to the Client’s specialty insurance management system.
• Automated customer risk scoring based on user-defined parameters: the scope of coverage, cargo type and value, operating location, past claims history, and more.
• Real-time premium calculation for standard cases based on a customer’s risk score and requested coverage terms.
• Auto-uploading of quotes and binding documents from the Client’s insurance system to the portal.
• Notifications to portal users about application processing and claim resolution milestones, expiring policies, etc.

Portal security features

• Permission-based access control for insureds, brokers, and agents.
• Multi-factor user authentication.
• Insurance data encryption in transit and at rest.
• Full audit trail of user activities.

After the portal was rolled out, the Client received detailed technical documentation for the solution and comprehensive user manuals.

Improved Efficiency and Lower Costs of Insurance Operations

The Client obtained a ready-to-use web portal that offers secure self-service features for specialty insurance customers, brokers, and agents and exchanges data directly with the MGA’s insurance management system. Convenient remote servicing spurred higher satisfaction of the MGA’s customers and partners. Moving request filing routines to the customer and agent side and applying data processing automation let the Client free its teams from low-value activities, which resulted in quicker and more efficient servicing workflows. ScienceSoft’s advice on the optimal design and tech stack for the portal helped the company optimize development and maintenance costs.

The success in automating customer and partner self-service inspired the Client to proceed with a larger-scale digital transformation of its specialty commercial insurance workflows.

Technologies and Tools

PHP, Ajax, JavaScript, jQuery, WordPress, MySQL.