Working smarter and more efficiently

About Apollo

Apollo Syndicate 1969 was originally founded in 2009. Since then, it has grown from a team of five, writing just two classes of business, to nearly 200 people with 23 classes of insurance and reinsurance business. Apollo Syndicate Management Limited secured FCA and PRA authorisation as a standalone managing agency in 2015. Widely respected as an independent, specialist insurer and reinsurer, with a team of talented and experienced professionals, Apollo offers a distinctively different market proposition founded on its ability to deliver rapid decision-making and robust (re)insurance solutions that respond precisely to individual clients’ needs.

Moving beyond ECF

By late 2019 the Chief Claims Officer Simon White was considering moving Apollo’s claims team to a Write-Back claims management system (CMS). He had heard consistently good things from colleagues in the London Market claims community about DOCOsoft. After seeing demonstrations of DOCOsoft and several other Write-Back systems, Simon and his team – several of whom already had Write-Back CMS experience with former employers – identified DOCOsoft as the best available option. Quite apart from its exceptional functionality and flexibility, Simon concluded that the DOCOsoft system just ‘looked and felt’ better than the alternatives.

Going live

Once DOCOsoft had been selected, much of the preparatory and implementation work took place remotely during the Covid-19 lockdowns and contact restrictions through the first half of 2021. All went smoothly, however, and Apollo went live on the DOCOsoft CMS – hosted on Apollo’s own cloud – in June 2021. Proactive engagement from DOCOsoft’s account managers and trainers – combined with the system’s designed-in ease of use – meant that Apollo’s claims handlers quickly felt at home with the new interface and its extended functionality.

A better way of working

Apollo’s claims team found the move away from reliance on ECF alone a step up in their working ways. Gone were the frustrations of a clunky, restrictive interface, of getting locked out of the system for several hours each time a password character went astray, and of being limited to a 7am-to-7pm GMT working day. The busy lives and time-zone-hopping travel schedules of modern claims professionals often leave them wanting to work on claims outside the hours when ECF is open. This was also compounded by the new way of operating in a hybrid world, when 7am to 7pm no longer represented a truly top-quality claims service. Being able to action a claim when and wherever the opportunity arose was a major plus for Simon and his team of claims handlers.

They all speak highly of the user-friendly look, feel, and functionality of the DOCOsoft CMS. It is intuitive, he suggests, to the point where you could put any reasonably experienced claims person – with no prior DOCOsoft experience – in front of a screen with a claim open and they could quickly find their way through to taking the appropriate actions on it. The huge amount of time, effort, and consultation with users that DOCOsoft’s software developers have put into designing the system, means that claims people find that functions and features are where they expect them to be – and do what they expect or want them to do.

Apollo Claims team members also cite the value of being able to add notes to help them pick up quickly on a claim they haven’t worked on for a while. Others make the observation that there are many well-designed screens on the DOCOsoft CMS that deliver functionality that is simply not available via ECF alone.

Efficiency gains

The net effect of moving to the DOCOsoft CMS has been that the Apollo Claims team experience fewer frustrations and spend less time on coaxing uncooperative and out- dated technology into doing what they want it to. Apollo’s claims team are experienced, highly skilled people whose time is best focused on activities where their input adds real value for the business and its customers.

‘At any given time,’ Simon White says, ‘we might have 20,000 open claims on the system, 8,000 of which we might be leading. That’s 8,000 claims that need attention on a daily, weekly, monthly basis. It’s a lot to get through – and we need to get every single one of them right. What DOCOsoft has enabled us to do is work smarter and more efficiently. It means we can get more done with the same resources in the same amount of time. Ultimately, we’re here to pay valid claims quickly and to provide the highest possible standard of service to our clients. Anything that helps us achieve that vision is a welcome addition’.