Major UK Financial Services Company
Sector
Financial Services
Size
1000 days
Background
This Financial Services’ company is a household name and will be referred to as ‘FS-Co’. FS-Co’s current online general insurance (GI) Home and Travel quote and application process isn’t attractive to the consumer and requires complete re-keying of data for all policies sold.
It’s the purpose of this project to provide a browser based solution for consumers to quote and apply online for up to date household product and for FS-CO’s call centre agents to support and update applications on behalf of the Consumer. Completed applications capture payment and load directly into a legacy AS/400 system without intervention.
Requirement
The objective of the project is to provide a platform from which volumes can significantly increase and that will load straight through to the AS/400 system. The challenge was the creation of a browser based “quote and apply” application that allows straight through processing of GI sales through a consumer facing web site, and internally through the Direct call centre.
It provides a uniform way of requesting quotes and submitting applications, simplifying training needs and allows for significantly increased volumes.
The requirement was to:
- Provide an Application that allowed 100% Straight Through Processing, when furnished with necessary info
- Provide an Application to be Disability and Discrimination Act compliant
- Ensure that the current ecommerce infrastructure within FS-Co is not put at risk
- Deliver a secure application, allowing applications to be loaded on to the AS/400
Provide a production system within four months of signing off the requirements – an aggressive timeframe
Solution
The Project was to conform to CPMF and FS-Co and Harvey Nash worked very closely together, in particular throughout the Requirements Analysis stage of the Project where representatives co-located in FS-Co’s offices to ensure communication was effective and to gain a thorough and detailed collective understanding of the business and system requirements from which a prototype was built. This set the foundations for the development of a system that fully met the requirements and limited potential misunderstandings and communication issues.
Harvey Nash provided a UK-based business analyst and an offshore business analyst working at the same location with FS-Co in order to maximise quality and minimise risk at this critical stage of the project. The analysis and design was completed under a Unified Process i.e. Use Cases, Functional spec, Use Cases, Activity diagram and model being the outputs.
Also, during this period a Hanoi-based architect from Harvey Nash worked in the UK to liaise with the FS-Co IT team to fully understand and agree the technical and infrastructure issues related to the development.
Following approval of the system requirements specification and prototype, the design and test plans were prepared by Harvey Nash and agreed with the Test Team, and the Technical Design Architect from FS-Co.
An Iterative delivery schedule was adopted to significantly reduce the risk of the final system not meeting both functional and non functional requirements and to ensure that testing began at an early stage in the project All Harvey Nash deliverables were been built according to FS-Co standards. Design and code reviews were undertaken to ensure compliance with the FS-Co IT Peer Review process.
Benefits
The changes introduced by Harvey Nash remove the vast amount of manual intervention required for applications, both within administration and finance. This provides increased control over the process thus decreasing the scope for error and rework, and reducing potential complaints, while enhancing the customer journey.
The changes provided Straight Through Processing (STP) of online quotes/applications, which decreased the level of manual work and improved accuracy.
The Customer / Business and Management benefits to FS-Co are as follows:
- Revised questions and phraseology make the overall site more attractive to the consumer and result in a lower fall out rate during the quotations through to buy stages
- Improved payment collection of online transaction payments by collecting all payments via Solve for credit and debit card payments or Direct Debit instructions
- Ability to save partial quotes and applications and later retrieve them, either internally (by staff) or externally (by consumer)
- Reduced amount of manual processing, by generating warning messages and updating the AS/400 rather than the current process of manually inputting the transaction
- Provided greater control of payment process and reconciliation
- Improved customer service and reduced cost
- Improved MIS capabilities
- Increased control and accuracy over all online applications
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