Insurance

12/3/2008 12:00:00 PM - Learn how Lincoln Financial Group, a leading manager and provider of life insurance, annuities, 401(k) plans, group benefits, mutual funds, institutional investment management and financial planning and advisory services met their objective of migrating to a single consolidated solution for standardized premium collection and suspense processing (i.e., a standardized process for handling all incoming remittances) with Purepay. Highlights include transactional exceptions handling, holdover of “not in good order” payments for research and resolution, integrated OFAC checks, paperless deposit, customized reporting and seamless web-based access to live and historical data.

Who will be speaking: Beverly Cobb from Lincoln Financial, Rob Haberman from Purepay and Amanda Hales from Purepay.

Below is a copy of the Q&A dialogue:

• Is Lincoln using ARC, and if not, why?
• How does RDC benefit the Insurance industry?
• Can I have different workflows depending for different coupons types? I.e. annuity vs. life insurance payments?

Is Lincoln using ARC, and if not, why?

We did not implement ARC right away; we had an immediate need to implement the system and didn't have the time to go through the necessary alerts that needed to go out to customers prior to implementing ARC.  So at the first state, which is where we are now, we have just implemented the remote deposit feature to allow us to send images and data files to the bank.  We have gotten some efficiencies out of that already as well as cost savings.  If you’re thinking about doing ARC, I would say it’s certainly a Day 2 item for us, we are going to keep it on the radar because there are some improvements and efficiencies we'll get by converting to ARC as well, but we wanted to get started right away.  The way we hit the ground running was just to implement remote deposit using the images and data files to the bank.  And as I mentioned already we know that we have faster availability of the money, we are able to invest it faster so we have investment income coming in sooner, in addition our bank fees have gone down significantly, its really amazing what this automated feed has done for us.  You think about what it takes to process a check and all the handoffs and so forth and then you’re sending an automated file in place of that check, which really has caused us to have a better work environment.
 
And on the flip side, if the check comes back returned, and I don’t' think we talked about that initially but the return comes back the same way where we have an automated feed coming back from the bank so we know the same day the bank gets it what’s been returned. We don't have to wait for the hard copy to come back in the mail to us, so we are able to react quicker to that as well.

How does RDC benefit the Insurance industry?

RDC allows the Insurance company to move the scanning a lot closer to the customer.  So if you have regional offices or local offices where people are accepting checks, it gets into the entire processing workflow a great good deal faster.  That result of course is it has an impact in terms of your cash flow and overall performance relative to the business.

Can I have different workflows depending for different coupons types? I.e. annuity vs. life insurance payments?

Absolutely, every menu option you saw there in the process menu, we can set up an application for single pass for your life payments that you may get on a regular basis with the scanlines and then we can setup another application for no scanline check only for annuity payments so everything can be configured, what you saw there was one code base where everything can be turned on or off so what you just saw can be configured for personal workflows.