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STEP Solutions Group: Simplifying Underwriting Processes

David Dillon, Co-founder, STEP Solutions GroupDavid Dillon, Co-founder
In the age of unified processes and comprehensive products, insurers still use legacy systems and separate applications for underwriting, quoting, billing, document and work flow management. Many underwriters rely on paper work and manual efforts to discern customer’s needs and design offerings accordingly. The obvious outcome of their folly is slow underwriting process and high business acquisition cost. Infusing the power of automation in underwriting process, Chicago, IL based STEP Solutions Group assists the insurers in pruning the operational, business acquisition, and policy cost with its web-based SaaS solutions. “STEP delivers efficiency, simplicity, and ease of use to all your key business functions and customers,” says David Dillon, Co-founder, STEP Solutions Group.

STEP’s Automated Underwriting solution—a part of its new business acquisition offering, uses Automated Risk Assessment Engine to expedite the underwriting process. The engine helps the insurers with configurable rules that classify the risk based on various parameters. External consumer data is fed online for validation and reconciliation and the cases are routed in automated manner according to product guidelines, coverage selections, and special medical underwriting rules. The solution routes not only the customer data but also workflow through its routing and task management module by the virtue of Business Process Modeling and Notation (BPMN 3.0). Organization units are at the center of defining routing and task queues and workflow rules are determined afterwards. Workflow and task management rules play a crucial role in managing individual roles and the associated tasks and they are able to handle task loads automatically.

To ease the process of product configuration, STEP leverages BPMN to manage all requirements and provides standard templates for application, underwriting, compliance, policy issuance, policy endowments, and claims processing requirements. Compliance is an integral part of product configuration and the company helps the insurers with centralized product configuration and management.


STEP delivers efficiency, simplicity and ease of use to all your key business functions—and customers


The integrated STEP document repository preserves all form templates, requirements, disclosures, and authorization for audit and thus complying with regulations is simpler. STEP’s Automated Underwriting solution helps the insurer with automated risk assessment, routing and task management, requirements management and these capabilities together support E-Issuance to make the product customer friendly as well.

The solution allows the applicants to review and sign the documents and policies electronically before being issued. It sends the policy to the applicant for final review and acceptance and reduces apply-to-issue cycle time. In one of the instances, large life insurance provider was issuing 125,000 policies yearly with chronic apply-to-issue cycle time. The client had to bear high overhead and new business acquisition cost with 85 underwriters, 150 call center agents, and 130 tele-service support executives. The insurer was using complex legacy systems and separate applications for underwriting, document and workflow management, and other processes and the compounded effect was $1400 in as average underwriting business acquisition cost. After deploying STEP’s integrated solution suite, the insurer could reduce underwriting headcount by 71 percent, tele-services support workforce by 54 percent and average new business acquisition cost to $625.

In the journey so far, STEP has created success stories akin to the large life insurer and concentrated its efforts on alleviating the complexities in underwriting arena. As automated product configuration and delivery have become new norms in underwriting arena, the company has great opportunity to increase market share and ensure better customer experience. At the end of the day, the policy applicants seek fast service and immediate policy issuance and STEP’s products aptly address their expectations.