It’s the time of year when we give out sweets to the trick or treaters calling at our door – as the kids come dressed up as witches, ghouls and monsters…but what does that have to do with Insurance?It’s not that easy to tie all this along to insurance data exchange in a topical blog, since there’s not a lot of overlap in insurance software and extorting sweets under cover of fancy dress.
What there is though, is a lot of Halloween tropes that you can make extremely contrived connections to, and present in a loose structure with no particular theme, rather like the pick n mix you might hand out to the trick or treaters. Here goes:
Scary Surprises… well this one is quite easy, we all know the Halloween jump scare when you come across something unpleasant and unexpected. This can be the case with Delegated Authority data presented in bordereaux, with hundreds or thousands of rows of data sent in a spreadsheet, it can be difficult to identify risks bound out of terms, or premium not paid or a claim that should have failed verification… getting visibility of data is key to avoiding the scary surprise.
Zombie data… dead data that still lurks, maybe an endorsement or cancellation on a risk you’ve never seen presented, maybe an error you’ve corrected but your business partners haven’t leaving them out of sync, there can be many causes of zombie data. Efficient and clear data exchange is the best solution, if you can’t make it to the Winchester.
Werewolves… come at the same time every month (more or less) and can be pretty troublesome to deal with… not just werewolves, but also bordereaux. The silver bullet is avoiding bordereaux when you can, using real-time APIs. Even when bordereaux can’t be avoided, a tool that decouples each row into separate transactions allowing simple pass through of valid data with no manual touchpoint and avoiding errors holding them up will turn even a sharp-fanged beast into a fluffy puppy.
Frankenstein’s Monster… (yes, I’m a pedant). A hacked-together mishmash of various things, sewn together so it just about works, sort-of… sounds like a common data standard or a bordereaux format that is trying to bridge the needs of various systems or teams… efficient data exchange should let the sender send what they can, and use smart transformation and enrichment to provide the receiver what they’ve needed.
Vampires… maybe bad data exchange doesn’t suck your blood, but it does suck your teams energy, turning them into spreadsheet manipulators rather than skilled insurance technicians using their knowledge to manage exceptions. Allowing touch-free pass through of valid data while clearly highlighting errors and supporting easy resolution keeps the energy suckers at bay like a cross made of garlic.
If you’d like a less cheesy discussion of how distriBind can support your data exchange and avoid any of the nightmares highlighted above, please get in touch.