Medical Acceptance
How Monuta acquired more customers, increased customer satisfaction and gained new market opportunities with Avola Decision
More efficient handling of claims as an objective
When consumers look for funeral insurance, they want to know immediately whether they can take out a policy or not. Until previously, processing an application could take up to two weeks. Thanks to Avola Decision, Monuta customers now know immediately whether or not they qualify for insurance and what the premium amount will be. Avola Decision also offers Monuta the scalability to easily enter the German market in the future.
- Consistent approach to new customers
Through fully automated decision making. - Higher customer satisfaction
Potential customers now know immediately how and at what premium they can be insured. - Acceptance time reduced to a few minutes
Through decisions made in real time. - Reduce underwriting fees by 10%
Only a quarter of new customers remain to be screened.
Accept new applicants faster and stop inconsistency
Monuta is a funeral home. It also allows consumers to purchase funeral insurance. The company is one of the largest in the Netherlands in this sector. The underwriting process of medical risks was the core challenge for Monuta. Each insurance company has a specific set of rules to determine whether a new application is accepted or not. There are also complex rules to determine the premium to be paid. Each person has a different risk profile due to the combination of factors such as age, gender and any conditions, which can also change. These rules are written down in procedures and are taught to employees, who then interpret them to make decisions.
Hans van Gerrevink is innovation manager at Monuta and responsible for implementing the new risk acceptance model. “Six years ago we decided to optimize the underwriting process for new customers,” says van Gerrevink. “Our customers do not easily talk about their medical history. It is also difficult for us to assess individual cases. Previously, we used all kinds of external factors and scientists to calculate the probability of death within a certain period of time. Then we looked at how much premium to pay in return. That sounds complicated, and it was. Sometimes a family member had to wait for an acceptance result, while the rest of his family was accepted immediately. We wanted to change that.”
“Because multiple employees had to interpret these rules and make the decisions, this approach was also very labor intensive. We had a team of several medical underwriters to make and define the medical decisions for underwriting. The average turnaround time from an application with potential insureds with medical problems and issuing an offer to the applicant was two weeks. A period during which the potential client could also research pricing with other insurers.”
The interpretation required by the decision-making process caused several problems. Some decisions were inconsistent. Two staff members could receive the same medical information and yet come to a slightly different conclusion. A consistent approach is necessary and better to ensure fair treatment of applicants.
Implementing a 100% straight-through solution
Monuta therefore needed a direct translation of business rules and legislation. This could be achieved by putting all rules and policies into a rule engine and using Avola Decision to automate decision making. Now when someone applies for insurance, they get an answer within milliseconds as to whether or not the insurance company will accept them. The results of Avola Decision provide the right input to instantly calculate the premium to be paid. The risk determination is based on a comprehensive set of rules related to medical issues.
Hans van Gerrevink: “We first set up the medical underwriting model with our partner Acumen, a consulting firm. What questions did we need to ask, what did we want to know and not know from potential customers? What are the risks of certain diseases? After a long search, the Avola Decision Platform turned out to be the flexible partner for us to model these variables in a rule engine.”
“The 24-hour availability of the rule engine is crucial for us,” he said. It is an indispensable sales tool for us. If it doesn’t work, sales stagnate. Fortunately, we have never had an outage. Implementing this solution took the company – after thorough preparation – six weeks and provided Monuta with a quick and user-friendly way to make these decisions.
What is Avola Decision?
Consistent approach, higher satisfaction, acceptance time from weeks to minutes, and 10% lower costs
That decision-making is now fully automated. With the push of a button, a decision is made whether an applicant will be medically accepted or rejected. This new approach is much simpler. Monuta saved several FTEs – and decisions are now made in real time. This enabled clear and consistent decision-making, as personal interpretation was eliminated and subjectivity is now avoided.
Customer satisfaction at Monuta has improved significantly. Potential customers now know immediately how and at what premium they can be insured. “About a quarter of potential new customers need to be investigated further,” he says. “A significant group that we can now help much faster because the rest are automatically accepted or not,” says Van Gerrevink. All this has resulted in an increase in sales because potential customers receive the offer for their insurance directly and thus no longer choose the competitor.
Monuta now uses the same decision logic for four different front-end systems, which only need to be updated once if a change needs to take place. The company just finished migrating to Avola’s enhanced cloud solution, which gives it more business process evaluation capabilities.
The cooperation with Avola enables Monuta to tap into other markets as well. Germany has a different insurance market and customer perception than the Netherlands, but Avola Decision will help the company bridge those barriers. Van Gerrevink: “In Germany, people are used to taking out life insurance without answering medical questions. As a result, every customer pays a higher premium and has a waiting period. Therefore, in Germany it is almost standard not to be insured for the first three years. We want to change that. Through our model, we can establish medical underwriting in five questions. With this we hope to conquer and change the German market.”
Automating decision-making also allows Monuta to simulate changes in policy underwriting. What would happen to the conclusion of decisions if they made certain changes in rules and policies? What would be the effect on applicants? How sensitive is a particular rule? All of these questions can now be answered by simulating scenarios in Avola Decision. “We are very pleased that we can now give 100 percent of our potential clients a satisfactory answer,” he said.
- Speed, Flexibility and Transparency
With Avola Decision, business rules can be created, modified, tested and released quickly and flexibly, without IT intervention. The intuitive interface makes it easy to define and understand rules without programming knowledge. - Insightfulness and Traceability
With Avola Decision, you maintain full control over versions of business rules, always having access to historical versions and tracking changes. - Central and Reusable Business Logic
Store all your business rules in one central place and maximize efficiency by designing rules in a modular way. This allows you to reuse rules in different contexts and processes.
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