EXL’s Life Insurance Group and Voluntary Benefits Billing as a Service (BaaS) Offering

The challenge: Group and Voluntary Benefits Carriers typically have multiple billing teams, managed separately, running on legacy systems often without a workflow tool delivering a sub-optimal customer experience. Additionally, they operate at a high operating expense (OPEX) while providing limited insights from data to reduce premium leakage or identify customers for cross sell.

EXL's solution: EXL understands customers' (the employers) expectation for a simple, timely and accurate billing experience. The employer experience becomes sub-optimal as the employer size increases as multiple billing groups exist and as number of products offered to the same employer increase. Moreover, the experience is also a function of the level of automation/straight-through processing enabled among other things.

Employers expect:

1. Billing issues are quickly resolved and do not continue to appear in the next bill
2. A single point of contact, more education and proactive outreach when it matters
3. Payments are applied correctly and on a timely basis
4. Bills are simple and easy to understand and pay

While EXL's solution is focused on improving the customer (employer experience), EXL can help insurance carriers reduce 30-40% OPEX in the immediate-to- medium term. We bring together our leading Employee Benefits talent, best of breed platforms further augmented by automation to deliver highest value at the lowest risk to carriers. Our flexible deal structure offers committed productivity gains, variable pricing model and gain sharing for advanced analytics transformation.

EXL’s BaaS helps clients deploy new operating models that significantly reduce OPEX while improving customer experience (CX). EXL's offering addresses the key components of the operating model, i.e. people, process, technology and metrics.

People:

1. In the immediate-term, drive value by sourcing all roles other than customer facing roles
2. Rebadge customer facing roles
3. Revisit multiple roles within billing to eliminate handoffs, e.g. combine all back end processing, research and reconciliation related activities
4. Align billing teams by book of business
5. Staff for analytical, accounting and reconciliation skills, especially for back office tasks;

Process:

1. Eliminate multiple handoffs throughrole rationalization across the billing value chain – bill generation, good order check and reconciliation, cash application, customer inquiry and resolution and premium error governance
2. Onboarding
   • include Billing team on 100% of welcome calls, targeting 90 to 100% completion
   • define standard service catalogue by employer segment especially for small and medium segments
   • promote internet billing (list bill cases) across segments especially for under 500 lives to give employers more control and transparency over the billing proces
   • for non-internet billing customers, deploy smart intake solutions to ingest supporting docs in multiple formats to validate the premiumBill generation:
3. Bill generation:
   • institute mandatory first bill audit
   • simplify bill template including a walk from previous month to current month’s bill
4. Reconciliation:
   • deploy analytics to recommend the next best match for a low touch reconciliation
5. Cash application
   • automate payment application
   • revisit the tolerance limits for straight through processing
6. Premium error governance:
   • Plug premium leakage through light analytics identifying customers for audit who frequently miss payment due dates, have aged due and unpaid balance or have multiple adjustments
   • Automate audit process for targeted and frequent audits

Technology:

While EXL is technology platform agnostic, we have developed a suite of digital assets for automating the billing process. Additionally, we can bring our partners for best of breed technology platforms.

1. EXL’s Virtual Billing Assistant – automated intake of supporting docs, analytics driven next best match and reconciliation and RPA assisted auto cash application
2. EXL’s Smart Workflow Management (SWM) tool for effective inventory management
3. EXL’s Desktop Aggregator – aggregation of relevant data points on a single screen to support Billing Coordinator’s discussion with the customer to resolve discrepancies
4. EXL’s early warning billing leakage and automated premium audit solution – data driven predictive analytics to target select accounts for audit

Metrics:

Maintain and continuously improve key metrics:

• 30 to 40% reduction in OPEX
• Under 48 hours TAT for service requests
• Plug billing leakage
• Reduced over 30, 90 and 180 day due and unpaid premiums
• Reduced over 30, 90 and 180 day suspense aging

1. Improved customer experience
   • Customized journeys by Employer type
   • Single point of contact for the Employer
   • Speedy resolution of service request
   • Proactive outreach
   • Customer-centric views of policy, billing and payment info
   • Simplified, easy-to-understand bill
     • A walk from previous month’s billed amount to current month
     • Online tutorials/ videos
2. 30 to 40% reduction in OPEX
   • Global talent pool
   • Low touch/ straight through processing leveraging our digital assets
3. Enhanced broker experience through faster payment of commissions
4. Improved cash flow
5. Improved cross-sell
6. Access to EXL's partner network