Falcon Risk Services is incredibly honored to be recognized as the winner of the 2024 Datos Insights Impact Awards for the Core Technology category for our work transitioning from manual policy & claims processes to a fully digital environment. The Insurance Technology Impact Awards program aims to recognize insurer IT initiatives and projects that have generated significant business impact for their organizations. To read their official announcement, please click here.
Rich Pluschau, CIO at Falcon highlights, "Our strategic engagement with Cogitate has drastically improved our speed-to-market, enabling Falcon to process submissions, produce quotes and issue policies in a fraction of the time. These efficiency gains are a key part of our value proposition of being first to market in providing innovative insurance solutions."
This was no easy feat. We would like to extend our gratitude to our partners at Cogitate as well as everyone at Falcon Risk Services who contributed to the success of this initiative.
Read our winning submission below.
Falcon Risk Services: Digital Policy and Core Migration
Falcon Risk Services transitioned from manual policy and claims processes to a fully digital environment, implementing Cogitate's DigitalEdge Policy and Claims platforms. This transformation supported growth across multiple products, enabling enhanced underwriting, producer management, compliance, and data-driven capabilities.
Business Need: Falcon Risk Services initiated this project to address growing submission volumes that were overwhelming manual underwriting processes. Compliance research for sanctions and producer management took 15-20 minutes per submission, with risks of human error. Claims and underwriting processes had significant opportunities for improvement due to disparate manual processes and inconsistent data standards.
Project Team: The project involved a small internal team including the CIO, a business analyst, two underwriting SMEs, and an ops SME. Cogitate provided external support with a project manager, customer success lead, QA leads, technical lead, and developers.
Phases and Timeline: The project was executed in multiple phases. Phase 1, a large MVP program for Excess Follow Form, completed in 7 months. Subsequent phases included additional LOB rollouts, integration with other systems, and ongoing enhancements.
Tools and Technology: The project utilized Cogitate's DigitalEdge Policy and Claims platforms, integrated with sanctions.io, S&P Cap IQ, Snowflake, Azure, and MS Dynamics.
Challenges and Success Factors: The main challenge was scope creep due to underestimating the complexity of automating so many manual processes under very aggressive timelines. Success factors included a talented and engaged team from both the insurer and Cogitate, and an effective UAT sprint approach.
Impact: The implementation drastically reduced cycle times, with submission processing decreasing from 45 minutes to 3 minutes, and quote generation time reduced to 10 minutes. It also simplified building/managing a high-level tower of underlying carriers on a quota-share basis. Compliance, data leverage capabilities, and claims processes improved. Operational costs were reduced, allowing for restructuring of the underwriting unit, processing more with existing staff, and fueling growth. The insurer now captures more data for analysis and has implemented triage rules to prioritize high-potential submissions.