Johannesburg - FNB's Automated Funeral Claims Process has been recognised by Celent, a global research and advisory firm for the financial services industry, as the winner of a 2023 Model Insurer Award in the Customer Experience category for its Automated Funeral Claims Process.

Celent's annual Model Insurer Awards recognise the best practices of technology usage in different areas of insurance business operations. Nominations submitted by insurance providers undergo a rigorous evaluation process by Celent analysts. Celent reviews the submissions based on three core criteria: demonstrable business benefits of live initiatives; the degree of innovation relative to the industry; and the technology or implementation excellence.

Chief Executive of FNB Life, Lee Bromfield, says, "We are truly honoured to be recognised by a global programme such as Celent for the FNB Automated Funeral Claims Process. This award affirms the lengths to which FNB has gone to create industry-leading insurance solutions and processes that cater for customers."

FNB identified an opportunity to scale its Funeral claims processing capabilities while also reducing resourcing costs through the development of an end-to-end automated claims process. The automated claims process brings together technologies such as optical character recognition, machine learning, integration with external third-party information services and risk assessment models on a single workflow orchestration platform to assess claims and provide digital feedback to customers within minutes.

"With our Automated Funeral Claims Process, we wanted to find a way to keep our promise to our customers by assessing and paying out funeral claims to beneficiaries as quickly as possible during difficult times, while also ensuring that our business remains stable from a cost perspective. In line with our commitment to fast and fair claims payments, we have taken steps to automate the claims process as far as possible."

"To date, FNB Insure has processed over 23 000 claims through the automated process, with pay-outs valued at around R156 million. Of these, 35% required no human intervention whatsoever. In addition, we've also seen remarkable time saved on claims, with the average time taken to process a claim ranging at 5.7 minutes. Our fastest claim was processed and paid out in 2.2 minutes," says Bromfield.

According to Rob Norris, Senior Analyst at Celent: "The Model Insurer Awards recognise how insurers are using technology to change the face of insurance. These insurance carriers should serve as an inspiration to others looking for strong examples of best practice implementation that will have a truly meaningful impact on business results and the industry overall. The entry from FNB Life clearly demonstrated this."

These awards will be included in the list of accolades that FNB Life has collected since its inception in 2015. Among many, this includes being named Top Life Insurer for Client Satisfaction South Africa by the South African Customer Satisfaction Index (SACsi), winning the internationally acclaimed Global EFMA-Accenture Innovation in Insurance Awards for digitising funeral insurance in 2016 and for the predictive mortality model in 2019 at the same awards.

"Our primary focus since inception has been on driving digitisation and taking a multi-channel approach to insurance, for both the benefit and convenience of our customers. We remain highly committed to offering our customers excellent value and seamless experiences in relation to their insurance products and believe that the integration of our offerings into FNB's industry-leading digital capabilities has continued to give us a competitive advantage in both the local and global markets," concludes Bromfield.