Bupa Financial Advisor Portal

For Bupa, every process — from quoting to writing and renewing insurance policies — was still paper based. Practiv proposed a fundamental change in the way Bupa did business, with an online portal for advisors to directly enter application details as they interviewed clients. We called it Mercury.

Writing life Insurance is a business process that requires over 200 data points. Independent Financial Advisors once completed paper-based application forms with their clients and posted these to Bupa. In turn, Bupa reviewed the forms and returned them to the advisor for correction, completion of missing sections, completion of follow-on questions or with requests for medical examinations.

Practiv’s experience defining business outcomes, automating business process, implementing rules engines, and managing process change, allowed us to deliver an online portal for Bupa end-to-end, and change the way they did business forever.

In addition to data entry savings, validating client responses in real time improved the quality of inputs to the subsequent processes. An underwriting system asked follow-on questions as part of the same interview and could make underwriting decisions on a wide range of cases. This capability eliminated the multiple cycles of request and response that had been such an issue with the manual system.

With the introduction of Mercury, Bupa saw a 45% increase in business inside the first six months, and a doubling of business over the first two years. The vast majority of new business is now written online, with a 50% reduction in turnaround time for online applications. The majority of online applications are processed inside of 24 hours.

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