Fireman’s Fund is a premier property and casualty insurer. It provides personal, commercial and specialty insurance products throughout the United States. As of year-end 2007, the insurer had assets of more than US$10 billion and gross written premiums of more than US$6 billion.
Business challenge
As the soft market relative to insurance pricing continues and rates remain relatively low, insurance companies face additional challenges in generating growth. But accuracy in underwriting –determining what risks to take on, how to assess them and how to price them –and efficiency in claims processing are two areas in which all insurers must consistently excel, no matter what the market conditions. Fireman’s Fund took up the transformation of its underwriting operations to give its underwriters the tools to adapt to market changes quickly and help improve risk decisions. In addition, the insurer sought to eliminate silos and increase operational efficiency by bringing together its claims processing for all lines of business, including auto, property and general liability, onto an enterprise-wide claims processing platform.
How Accenture helped
To help Fireman’s Fund build a more efficient and effective underwriting operation, Accenture implemented its
Underwriting Components Solution. Built on Microsoft .NET technology and running on a Microsoft Windows Server, this platform enables underwriters to follow core underwriting principles thereby making more consistent decisions about risks. Further, the web-based application provides easy access to the most current data leading to better, more informed risk decisions. The solution also eliminates the need to enter data more than once thereby lowering the incidence of human error and increasing efficiency. Accenture built and deployed the system across all commercial lines and all 50 states in less than a year.
To assist Fireman’s Fund in transforming its claims operation–a function that encompasses people, process and technology –Accenture implemented its Claim Components Solution. Claim Components Solution brings a standard, automated, repeatable process to every aspect of claims handling, resulting in better control of the expenses of handling a claim and better customer service.
High performance delivered
More than 500 commercial underwriters and their teams now use the new underwriting platform and are achieving several points of combined loss and expense improvement as well as increased target account growth. The claim solution has lowered Fireman’s Fund’s claim expenses by reducing the time required to handle a claim and enabling adjusters to spend more time on value-add and customerfacing activities. Overall, Fireman’s Fund has lowered its expenses by several basis points and is positioned to write new business more consistently, leveraging best practices from across the company in an automated manner. Accenture has met or beaten every deadline date and remained on or under budget on all projects delivered at Fireman’s Fund.
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