Case 01 · Financial services
A leading private life insurer, tens of millions of lives covered. The process was application verification. The number was straight-through rate.
The situation
Applications arrived through several channels and stopped in the same place: manual verification. Documents were read by hand, data was retyped into the policy administration system, and anything unusual joined a queue that was measured in days. Growth made it worse, because every additional application added a proportional amount of human reading. The team was excellent. The process was the constraint.
The baseline
Before anything was built, we measured the work as it ran: volumes by channel, touches per application, verification time by document type, exception rate, rework rate, and the fully loaded cost per verified application. The insurer's operations lead and finance owner co-signed that baseline. Both sides then agreed a single number that would decide whether the engagement worked.
The change
The redesign came before the technology. Steps that existed to compensate for earlier steps were removed. Verification was restructured around the decision rather than the document, so evidence is assembled once and reused. Only then did we build: extraction and validation running against the systems of record, a confidence threshold that routes clean cases straight through, and an exception path that surfaces genuinely ambiguous cases to a human with the evidence already gathered. Operators were in the room from week one, because adoption is a design input rather than a rollout phase.
The reading
At the reading, taken from the insurer's own systems: 95 percent of applications verified in under thirty seconds, and the same team processing 30 percent more applications without additional headcount. The exception queue stopped being a backlog and became a genuine exception queue.
What they own
The redesigned process, the verification system in production, the agents trained on the insurer's own document estate, the evaluation harness that proves those agents still perform, and the right to run all of it independently. The insurer's engineers co-built from the first sprint.
Start
If this looks like a process you run, the fastest next step is a conversation about the number that would matter.