AWS Partner Network (APN) Blog
How Insurity Enables Insurers to Pay Claims in Just 30 Seconds
By Jonathan Victor, CIO — Insurity
By Laura Krause, AVP, Digital Marketing — Insurity
By Sudeep John, Principal Partner Solutions Architect — AWS
By Pyone Thant Win, Partner Solutions Architect — AWS
By Emily Leizman, Sr. Sales Representative — AWS
By Siddarth Tickoo, Principal Partner Development Manager — AWS
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| Insurity |
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The insurance industry is a vital sector that provides risk management through various types of insurance contracts, covering uncertainties related to health, property, and life. The global market for Property and Casualty Insurance was estimated at US$3.6 Trillion in 2023 and is projected to reach US$5.3 Trillion by 2030, growing at a CAGR of 5.9% from 2023 to 2030. Insurity is a leading provider of cloud-based software for insurance carriers, brokers, and managing general agents (MGAs). Founded in 1985, Insurity is an insurance technology leader, trusted by 15 of the top 25 Property and Casualty (P&C) carriers, and 7 of the top 10 MGAs in the U.S.
In 2023, slow processing of claims was one of the most frequent complaints, accounting for about 23% of all insurance complaints. Unfortunately, claim processing time could last from several days to weeks depending on various factors, and insurance companies with conventional processing systems frequently encounter several issues:
- Limited payment options: Claimants expect their insurers to pay them via the method that they prefer but majority of disbursements are paid through paper checks.
- Inefficient processes: Streamlining the claims process is essential for insurers to enhance accuracy and shorten the time between claim approval and payment settlement.
- High payment costs: Printing and mailing checks are time-consuming and involve costly processing fees. Check-based payment processing fee can exceed $20 per transaction.
Leveraging the breadth and depth of Amazon Web Services (AWS), Insurity’s Claims Payments solution allows insurers to pay claims in as little as 30 seconds, transforming one of the most critical interactions carriers have with their policyholders. For insurers looking to transform their claims payment processes, Insurity’s Claims Payments solution supports both checks and digital payment types.
Insurity’s Claims Payments Platform Modernizes the Insurance Ecosystem
Insurity’s Claims Payments Platform allows insurers to offer simplified claims payment experience, while improving customer satisfaction for claim retention. This no-code offering allows insurers to streamline the claims process by managing payments in a single workflow from approval to issuance. Such speed and ease for payment processing is achieved through multiple electronic payment channels such as Real Time Payments (RTP), ACH bank transfers, and virtual cards to both insurance claimants and vendors. This approach offers several key benefits such as:
- Reduced Costs: By switching from checks to digital payments, insurers reduce claims payment costs by up to 50%.
- Efficiency Gains: The new claim process eliminates time-consuming and manual check-based processes while enabling “time out to check,” a configurable timeframe for an automatic fallback to check option.
- Increased Customer Satisfaction: Policyholders gain instant access to funds, which can significantly improve their satisfaction.
Figure 1 – Insurity’s Claims Payments software process overview
The Victory Insurance Success Story: Claims Paid 100% Faster
Victory Insurance, an authorized private workers’ compensation insurance carrier and licensed MGA, is known for closing claims faster than other industry providers. Victory’s President & CEO Keith Brownfield said, “We have an unwavering focus on providing best-in-class modern experiences to our policyholders, and Insurity’s Workers’ Comp Suite and Insurity Claims Payments are helping us achieve that goal.”
Despite their impressive claim cycle times, Victory was reliant on check-based claim payments and their legacy system did not have options for digital payments or instant payments for policyholders who prefer digital interactions.
Victory looked to Insurity’s Claims Payments for a solution that would increase security, decrease fraud, and optimize the policyholder experience. Victory integrated Insurity Claims Payments into their existing core suite, providing an improved experience for its policyholders and related payees. Brownfield noted, “We can now pay claims 100% faster than we did prior to implementing digital payment capabilities, with the ability to cut payment costs by 50%. Giving our policyholders the payment options and the speed they want only enhances our ability to exceed customer expectations and uphold our high retention rate.”
Insurity’s Architecture on AWS for Streamlined Claims Processing
- Multi-tenant Saas offering on AWS Fargate: Insurity’s Claims Payments is a containerized solution running on Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), Amazon Elastic Container Registry (ECR) and AWS Fargate for container management. Insurity selected Fargate as a task-based scheduler as it eliminates the need to manage nodes, simplifying some complexities of their cloud operations. With Fargate, the application’s containers do not require host network port specifications. Fargate allowed Insurity to focus on developing and deploying their core claims payments functionality, rather than managing underlying infrastructure, helping them deliver the rapid and reliable service that was critical for customers. The architecture below highlights Insurity’s multi-account, multi-region architecture for resiliency, security, disaster recovery and business continuity, empowering its clients to maintain minimal interruption to critical services even in the face of unexpected disruptions.
Figure 2 – Insurity’s Claims Payments solution high-level architecture diagram
- Shared-Security : Insurity enforces security by grouping workloads based on functionality. This separation allows Insurity to apply distinct security controls to each environment and to segregate access to sensitive data between different customers in their multi-tenant SaaS offering. In all Amazon Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs), Insurity is using AWS Key Management Service (KMS) to create, store and manage functional encryption keys. To ensure maximum availability and business continuity, Insurity has deployed its production workloads and disaster recovery environments in separate AWS regions. This multi-region redundancy strategy enabled Insurity to deliver an RPO (Recovery Point Objective) of 5 minutes and an RTO (Recovery Time Objective) of 4 hours.
In the shared-security VPC, Insurity deployed Amazon GuardDuty for threat monitoring. VPC flow logs plays a crucial role in securing the traffics. Insurity selected security technology partner solutions – Fortigate, Fortinet, Rapid7, Axonius, openVPN, Observe, CrowdStrike CSPM, and CloudFlare to extend the security footprint provided by AWS within Insurity’s VPC.
Figure 3 – Insurity’s Claims Payments shared-security VPC overview
- Resiliency and Disaster Recovery: AWS’s global footprint played a crucial role in Insurity’s migration of the Claims Payments solution to the cloud since high availability, performance, and scalability are important factors for Insurity’s customers. The Production VPC runs on a multi-AZ setup and uses KMS for encryption for EKS, Fargate, and ECR. Insurity also hosts Microsoft SQL Servers running on Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) instances, along with AWS App Mesh Internal Network Load Balancers are used within this VPC. The database tables and stored procedures are encrypted, and any PII (Personally Identifiable Information) is also encrypted using the same service. Backups of the data are stored in an S3 bucket.
Figure 4 – Insurity’s Claims Payments multi-AZ production architecture
The DR (Disaster Recovery) VPC has a pilot setup, with critical services running continuously. The DR architecture is similar to the Production architecture in Figure 4 with multi-AZ setup. This includes EC2 instances for the SQL Server, which is configured in an SQL Always-On cluster with continuous replication between three nodes. Two nodes run in the Production VPC for high availability, and one node is in the DR VPC for failover. A Transit Gateway is used to peer the Production and DR VPCs, which are located in the us-east-1 (N. Virginia) and us-west-2 (Oregon) regions, respectively. Insurity runs an annual DR exercise where clients are invited to participate and validate their own failover test cases alongside Insurity’s test activities. All these architectures combined allows Insurity’s solution to achieve industry-standard resiliency.
- AWS App Mesh: AWS App Mesh provides application-level networking that simplifies how traffic flows between services, allowing for easier configuration and optimization of application performance. App Mesh plays a critical role in the Insurity Cloud supporting the ecosystem of services on the EKS cluster. In the process of expanding an ecosystem of services on Kubernetes cluster hosted on AWS, Insurity faced the challenge of needing to expose more than one service to the public. Insurity solved this challenge by creating a virtual ingress gateway with App Mesh. The ingress gateway serves as a single external entry point, offering enhanced routing to different applications hosted under multiple clusters based on route prefixes or header information. This approach allowed Insurity to continue leveraging a single load balancer routing to the designated application pod running under the EKS Cluster without complicating the control of traffic routing.
Figure 5 – Optimized solution architecture with AWS App Mesh
Pioneering Real-Time Claims Payments
Insurity built their Claims Payments Platform in partnership with Dream Payments, powered by J.P. Morgan’s payment backend. The Dream Payments API and Insurance Payment Network enables Insurity’s insurance carrier and MGA clients to send real-time claim payments to claimants and service providers across the insurance ecosystem. Both Insurity and Dream Payments solutions run on AWS, providing the speed, security, and flexibility necessary to drive such a transformation.
“As the CTO of Dream Payments, the collaboration between Insurity, Dream, and AWS represents a pivotal moment in our joint mission to transform and improve the claims payment experience for policyholders and insurers alike. Together, we are not just innovating; we’re setting a new paradigm for expectations about how claims are rapidly processed and immediately paid. The synergy of Insurity’s cloud-based software, Dream’s Insurance Payment Network, and AWS’s unparalleled infrastructure enables us to offer a seamless, rapid payment experience. By reimagining the claim payment process from the ground up and through harnessing AWS’s robust, scalable, and secure environment, we are empowering Insurity’s insurance clients to issue payments within seconds, thereby providing policyholders with immediate access to funds when they need them most.” – Long Van, CTO of Dream Payments
A Winning Combination for the Insurance Industry
Insurity and Dream Payments’ partnership, powered by AWS, sets a new standard for the insurance industry. Both Insurity and Dream were recognized by Datos Insights as a Prominent Provider of Payment Solutions in the report, Payment Gateways in Insurance: Overview and Prominent Providers. By creating a seamless, rapid, and secure payment experience, insurers can benefit from reduced claims disbursement costs, improved cycle times, and increased policyholder satisfaction.
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Insurity – Partner Spotlight
Insurity is an AWS Technology Partner with AWS Financial Services Competency that offers a leading cloud-based software for insurance carriers, brokers, and managing general agents (MGAs).