Insurance Underwriting - pushing decisions to the point of contact

Auto Club Group, a AAA insurer, has used business rules to automate underwriting decisions - a classic business rules scenario. LIke many insurers they were manually reviewing 100% of their policy requests.As they expanded into new markets they needed to make independent agents prefer to work with them and they needed to keep their costs under control while growing their business. All of this in a heavily regulated market with different laws and restrictions in each of the states in which they did business - on top of federal laws and company policies.

Auto Club Group came to InterACT, Fair Isaac's show, in October of 2004. Here they heard the Hartford talk about using business rules to automate underwriting for the first time. 9 months later they were live and 12 months later they were able to come to InterACT 2005 and present the results! 99% of their policies are now underwritten automatically, their business has grown 35% and the number of independent agents joining their network has tripled. Not bad for the first year of a new system!

A detailed case study on ACG is available here and they are mentioned in several articles:

• ESJ Trends: End-User Application Development using Business Rules
• ADT: The Business Rules Approach—a Zero-Sum Game?
• ADT: Proponents Push Business Rules, But Programmers Aren’t Buying, Yet
• Intelligent Enterprise: Business Rules Meet the Business User

I'll leave the last work for Mike Koscielny of ACG “We are creating a framework to execute business decisions that any company would envy. We can profitably win the good business we want to win and lose the bad business we want to lose.”

UPDATE: Mike add's some more color to this description in this BI Review article - Decision Management Evolution