Online Account Reconciliation

Online Account Reconciliation (continued)

The Requirement

Many insurers provide online access to both personal line and commercial line products to a network of insurance brokers. And many offer online “full cycle” insurance management.
However, even in these times, the provision of monthly statements to brokers, the reconciliation of those statements, and the payment and collections is often a tedious, paper-based manual process.

• It is slow, time consuming and error-prone.
• Query handling lacks immediacy and, often, there is no query audit trail available to all parties.
• There is no ongoing visibility of the status of an account as the month progresses.
• Collections lack predictability and cash management suffers.
• And these problems compound across the insurer’s broker network.

This obsolete process impairs credit risk management for the insurer, makes them difficult to work with and reduces competitiveness.

The Solution

Discover IT and MMA Insurance, together, developed a Broker Online Account Reconciliation Service to provide an automated system for delivering monthly statements online to MMA’s network of brokers. A new statement is issued at the start of each month. A typical monthly online broker statement cycle is shown in the diagram below.




The statements are simply laid out and are easy for the brokers to use.  They can be shown in summary form, or expanded to show full details. They can be exported to an Excel file and printed, if required. And it is very easy to retrieve historic statements to track back.

Detailed information on a statement item column is revealed with a simple mouse click.
For example:

Policyholder details:

Policy History details:

Transaction details:

 Depending on the size of the broker or broker chain, statements can include from a few items to over 10,000 items. The ability to control how many items are displayed on a page and to filter items is important, as is the ability to sort by column.
Statements can be worked and progressed on a day-to-day basis and the result of a day’s work can be saved at any time and reviewed by the insurer, and any queries dealt with immediately.
Items can be agreed for settlement by simply checking a box. And all items on a given page can be checked using a “check all” checkbox. A statement summary of Total Marked, Total Due and Total Overdue is shown at the bottom of each page, as is the Number of Open Queries.
Notes can be added to any item and individual items can be queried by clicking on the “N” link for notes or the  question mark icon for queries. These are displayed at the left of each statement item.

An example of the Query screen is shown below:

An audit trail of the comments and the source of comments is provided.

The system integrates in real-time with the insurer’s back-end business system via a series of web services.

In summary:

Online Statements

• Issued monthly.
• Enables computer-based interaction – replaces paper.
• 1 – over 10,000 transaction items per statement.Statements can be filtered and sorted by column.Statements can be exported.
• Items include new policies, policy adjustments, policy renewals, policy refunds, administration adjustments, etc.
• Items may be agreed . . . i.e. settled and paid. Payments can be instructed online. Or items may be queried . . . queries can be opened and closed . . . attachments can be uploaded.
• Items not settled (paid) in the month are carried over to following month statement as overdue items.
• Some items may be future due . . . e.g. where inception date is in current month.
• Each day, the statement provides an up-to-date view.

For the broker, the online statement  always provides an up-to-date view and improves the processing workflow. And it helps to resolve queries clearly and quickly.

For the insurer, the system improves cash flow and reduces overdue debt and debt ageing. Moreover, during the month, the visibility of the broker account relating to items agreed and items queried is improved substantially.

And the elimination of unnecessary paper reduces costs . . . and helps the rainforest!