Leading insurance firm April UK has considerably improved its processes and reporting systems thanks to a new centralised IT system.
As one of the UK’s leading providers of Income Protection and Personal Medical Insurance (PMI), April UK holds information on more than 100,000 policies and around 2,000 sales advisors, past and present, and the volume of data that needs to be held is increasing every day.
Over the years, as the information had grown, it had been stored in various different places making it difficult to access and also tricky to produce certain reports needed for compliance.
April UK turned to software firm Spark Data Systems (http://www.sparkdata.co.uk) to build a new system. Spark presented a proposal to merge all this information in a central system and working alongside the April UK staff that use it, built an easy to use browser based application.
“Thanks to the merge, all our advisor information is now in one place,” said April UK CEO Sarah Buck, “which means there is much more consistency. Everything matches up and there is no need to enter details such as advisor name or date of birth more than once and if anyone updates advisor information, the change is seen by everyone else immediately.
One of the key reports April UK can now generate is an “Advisor Life Story”: a chronological description of everything that advisor has done with the company, from recruitment, through qualification, sales progress, promotions and exit.
“Being able to produce this type of report is now a requirement for Insurance companies in the UK and something which is being scrutinized by auditing bodies such as the FSA,” explains Sarah.
“Whilst all the information was available before, it was distributed across a number of systems making it tricky to produce. With the new system, it is easy.”
“We also now have a better platform for dealing with future requirements. With everything central, and using up to date technology, we can more easily add new functions.”
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