The insurance market is increasingly competitive, with customers constantly on the lookout for a better deals and improved service, making it critical to gain every possible advantage.
One of the best ways to build competitive advantage is through your client onboarding process.
In this article, we’ll look at the three key issues to consider during onboarding as well as the benefits an efficient onboarding process can offer your business.
The Insurance environment every possible competitive edge is critical – a key differentiator we’re going to look at in this article is onboarding because an efficient onboarding process has huge benefits.
That’s a lot to get right in a first encounter with a customer, but with the right systems and processes in place, onboarding can become quick, easy and pain-free for both you and your customers.
Three key issues to consider during onboarding are:
- The financial health of your customer.
- Ensuring that your process is fully compliant with relevant legislation.
- Making a good first impression leading to positive, lasting customer relationships.
Let’s take a look at these three key issues in more detail and show how Red Flag Alert can help.
Risk
Onboarding new clients can be challenging, especially if there are large volumes of customers. This means a lot of time and resources go into making creditworthiness decisions, which can lead to mistakes, longer processing times and reduced revenues.
While you probably want to avoid long due diligence processes and leaving imprints on customers’ credit files, making rushed credit check decisions can be very costly for your business. This means you need a balance between mitigating risk and delivering fast onboarding.
Red Flag Alert can help you instantly ascertain the real time financial health of a business, which means you can decide instantly whether it’ll pass credit control or not. Our unique flag systems means that you can quickly accept or reject clear-cut cases, giving you more time to investigate borderline customers using rich and detailed data.
For insurers, you can decide what, if any, credit limit to give, which policy is right for your customers, and the level of risk of default. For brokers, it can also help them choose which insurer is the best fit.
Red Flag Alert’s data can also be integrated into your CRM system so that you’re instantly updated of any changes. All of this means you can take credit control into your own hands in a prompt and correct manner, mitigating risk on an ongoing basis.
Compliance
As an insurer, you have to make sure you remain compliant with all anti-money laundering (AML) regulations, as well as with GDPR. This is particularly important during onboarding, when you need to perform adequate Know Your Client (KYC) and Credit Checks.
Effective from January 2020, the Fifth AML directive (AML5D) applies to any insurer offering insurance products with cash values or investment features, such as annuity contracts or life insurance policies. This legislation brings with it a fairly large compliance burden, especially for larger insurers, and tougher penalties for non-compliance. Brokers are also affected, and can be held accountable if clients are found to be involved with irregular activity or if the correct procedures aren’t in place or followed.
Luckily, Red Flag Alert offers a comprehensive AML service for insurers that covers everything from ID verification to secure audit trails.
Insurance is a data-driven business, and that often includes personal data, so being compliant with GDPR is also important. Again, Red Flag Alert will help you to adhere to the legislation because having a clear master data management (MDM) process means you’ll be able to track and manage your data to enable compliance.
Relationships
Ensuring you get both risk and compliance right can take time – and any delay can negatively affect your customer’s first experience and, therefore, your longer-term relationship. But Red Flag Alert’s services can help speed up your onboarding process, so your customer relationships won’t suffer.
In fact, that’s where your onboarding process can become a competitive advantage. By using Red Flag Alert’s comprehensive dataset and AML service, you can be ahead of your competitors in terms of fast, accurate and efficient onboarding.
You’ll also have peace of mind that you’re making the best credit control decisions for your business based on the most up-to-date information, and that you’re fully compliant with AML and GDPR legislation.
This is now important more than ever as customers can shop around at the click of a button and expectations of instant service grow, every day. By providing high-quality, fast onboarding you’ll be laying the foundations for positive, lasting customer relationships.
Your customers will also be more likely to recommend your services to others – and despite the growth in automated searches and comparisons, the value of word-of-mouth sales should never be underestimated.
The Ultimate Onboarding Solution
For all of these reasons and more, Red Flag Alert offers the perfect onboarding solution for insurers and brokers. The Red Flag Alert dataset offers high-quality, accurate information on the financial health of potential customers, acting as both an important credit control and business development tool that’s fully GDPR compliant. Our AML services can significantly ease your regulatory burden.
All of this is provided with one flat rate that includes all support, and bespoke configuration for seamless integration into your systems.
Our detailed business information offers:
- Up-to-date information on over 6.5 million businesses in the UK
- 50,000+ new businesses every month
- 100,000+ updates every day
- Over 20 million key decision-makers
- Over 100 data points on every business
- 7 financial health ratings
Our AML service offers:
- Full range of risk level checking
- Unbeatable match rates
- ID verification
- Enhanced due diligence
- Sanctions and PEPs real-time screening
- Monitoring alerts
- Simple interface
- Secure audit trail
To discuss how Red Flag Alert’s KYC AML Platform can improve policies and procedures, start a free trial today
