Claims technology — why service makes all the difference
To deliver a great claims service, Lloyd’s and London Market carriers need great technology. But that’s only half the story. The aftersales care and ongoing service that stand behind it can make or break a claims technology solution.
In an environment as complex and interconnected as the London Market, great technology can act as a performance multiplier. If your team is working directly in ECF today, you’ll know how much relies on external controls and checklists—setting and policing authority limits, obtaining manager sign-offs, diarising reminders to protect SLAs, running sanctions checks before payment, chasing documents, routing work to the right handler, reconciling reserves, re-keying data and assembling MI/audit evidence by hand.
Of course, it’s perfectly possibly to run claims capably in ECF. Many teams do. But imagine the step-change that comes with having those controls embedded in your workflow: authority limits that trigger approvals automatically, SLA timers and nudges that keep files on track, background sanctions screening tied to payees and transactions, automated assignment and routing, one-click DMS filing, automated validations against policy data, consistent reserve movements, and, crucially, MI you can trust. That’s what a well designed and well supported CMS can add.
A great CMS – with great service behind it – means fewer manual hand-offs, less re-keying, easier compliance with market-agreed SLAs and regulatory expectations, faster cycle times, and clearer oversight. ECF keeps the market moving, but a good CMS helps you move faster and with greater confidence.
The right technology can be a real gamechanger. But, to deliver the best possible claims performance, for your customers and your shareholders, you need a technology partner who collaborates, monitors, fixes, communicates, and continuously improves like a fully engaged extension of your own team. One who goes beyond the traditional reactive service carriers have come to expect from technology vendors. One who understands the complexity of the market you operate in and who has the skills and expertise to identify issues and flag them. One who takes ownership, proactively monitoring message flows, preventing blockages, coordinating with market bodies, and flagging issues before they cause problems.
Now, more than ever, service matters
Rapid change is fact of life in today’s (re)insurance market. Digitalization and claims transformation projects like Blueprint Two are reshaping placement, accounting, and claims, with new data standards and new orchestration expectations.
As London transitions towards to ACORD EBOT/ECOT messaging, the ILU/LIRMA pathways are being reviewed so that company market claims align with the end-state digital model. At the same time, ACORD’s ECOT enhancements (ECOT+) are expanding the claims message to handle subscription-market specifics — richer data, clearer roles and cleaner orchestration — which should cut exceptions and ease straight-through processing. For carriers and vendors, such developments underline the need to run EDI and ACORD concurrently during transition, with active monitoring to keep sequences healthy across the board.
As all the changes play out, carriers need claims technology partners who are fully across all the latest developments, actively contributing to the debate around them, making sure they’re fit for purpose when they reach the market, and ready to help carriers adapt with minimal disruption.
Operational resilience is a key consideration here. FCA and PRA rules require firms to operate within a range of impact tolerances for all important business services by 31 March 2025. That includes how they handle claims. Your technology partner’s resilience, adaptability and responsiveness will materially affect your ability to comply.
Shared-market processes require constant vigilance. From ECF Writeback to SCAP, it’s not enough to ‘connect once’. To respect SLAs and deliver appropriate customer outcomes, technology providers need to be able to actively monitor integrations, chase-up missing messages, and resolve exceptions fast.
What good claims technology service looks like for specialty carriers:
Proactive monitoring, not passive support
When a broker updates a claim on ECF, Writeback messages should flow reliably into your claims management system. Writeback messages are received in an ascending sequence for each carrier. If a sequence goes missing or is not received in a timely fashion. you want your provider to be spotting it, chasing it, and reconciling it — ideally before your team even notices.
Deep, London Market integrations — kept healthy
Integrations like GEMINI (expert appointments and fee settlement) deliver tangible MI and spend control — if the API traffic is monitored and exceptions are resolved quickly with DXC, Ecliptic and carriers. That’s a service discipline as much as a technical one. It also ensures experts get paid in a timely fashion, maintaining good relationships and smoothing the path to productive collaboration.
Fast, transparent issue resolution
Locked claims, replay failures, missing documents — these are all too familiar claims-tech facts of life. Working with a provider who triages, communicates clearly, offers workarounds, resolves root causes, and ideally resolves any issues before the claims handler even encounters them.
A genuine partnership model
An approach that pairs the carrier’s market expertise with the provider’s engineering knowledge to co-design a CMS that adapts as standards evolve — with user groups and best practice meetings translating feedback into roadmaps and a common low-friction upgrade path. Regular reviews and customer-success workshops can help turn agreed priorities into delivery, with clear escalation routes.
In-house expertise and accountability
Teams who build the product should be the ones supporting and improving it — so fixes and enhancements move quickly, and knowledge doesn’t get lost in hand-offs.
Measurable outcomes
Ultimately, good service should show up as quicker decisions, less duplication, better oversight, reliable data, and lower friction for handlers and customers. More proactive, less reactive: continuous monitoring, early detection and automatic recovery prevent exceptions and cut recurrence, so teams stop having to log the same issues again and again. Good service fixes root causes, not symptoms, bringing down recurring-issue and duplicate-ticket rates, and improving auto-recovery rates and times taken to clear locks.
Case-study examples of good service
1) Keeping ECF Writeback flowing
Writeback enables carrier claims teams to work from their own systems while receiving near-real-time claims data and documents. In practice, a DXC message may be delayed or fail to process via Writeback. The DOCOsoft CMS continuously checks sequence integrity. If a gap appears, our Support team is alerted, allows a short grace period, and, if necessary, requests a replay from DXC. Where a specific UCR would block processing, we temporarily lock that claim, so the rest of your traffic continues, fix the exception (reverting to the CWT file when DXC can’t process a message), and then unlock. Most of this runs automatically: sequence health checks, auto-replay requests, claim-level isolation and daily lock sweeps keep handlers moving. When a genuine edge case crops up, our London market team steps in — coordinating with DXC or other partners, applying safe workarounds, and keeping claims handlers updated. It’s unglamorous but essential work that protects SLAs and claims-handler productivity.
Most of this is fully automated. The CMS checks sequence health continuously, triggers replay requests automatically after a short grace period, isolates any affected UCR — so other traffic keeps moving — and sweeps locks daily. When a genuine edge case crops up, our London-market support team steps in — coordinating with DXC or any other relevant third party, applying safe workarounds, and keeping handlers updated.
2) GEMINI expert appointments and fee settlements
The CMS automatically synchronises the carrier’s approved expert panel from GEMINI into the CMS overnight. During the day, client claims handlers appoint experts, set budgets, and track spend. Updates and invoices flow via API and Writeback (including parallel UCRs), keeping reserves current. If a GEMINI call fails (for example: ‘carrier code not present’), our monitors alert the team, we open a ticket, and we coordinate with Ecliptic and/or the carrier to clear it, keeping both appointment and finance data aligned.
3) Navigating market initiatives
Service also means translating new regulatory and market requirements into robust functionality within the CMS. We implement changes required by — for example — SCAP processing, Writeback behaviours, data standards from Lloyd’s and Blueprint Two, and more — without disrupting claims handlers from their daily tasks.
4) System changes, implementation and upgrades
To ensure any major changes land cleanly, it helps to have a named project manager and business analyst, structured training for handlers, and hands-on go-live and post-go-live support.
Outcomes carriers can reasonably expect
- Quicker decisions and fewer handoffs thanks to intuitive user inferface, configurable workflows and integrated data
- Less duplication and stronger oversight across Lloyd’s and Company Market, Bureau and non-Bureau claims
- Higher confidence in data for MI, Solvency II returns, and all relevant regulatory reporting
- Lower operational risk through proactive monitoring, resilient operations, and zero reliance on outsourced support.
A note on market scale: DOCOsoft systems handle around half of all London Market claims messages — showing that robust capabilities and dependable service can coexist at scale.
A quick checklist for evaluating provider service offers
Monitoring: Does the potential provider detect missing or out-of-sequence messages automatically and chase replays with DXC? (Ask to see evidence and metrics.)
Exception handling: What’s the playbook for locked claims, failed API calls, or document mismatches?
Integration stamina: How do they keep GEMINI, DMS and underwriting system integrations healthy day-to-day — not just at go-live?
Communication cadence: Will you have a named Account Manager, quarterly reviews, and clear escalation routes?
Community and roadmap: Is there an active user community that genuinely influences priorities?
In-house accountability: Are support and development under one roof, with clear ownership of fixes?
Regulatory alignment: Can they support you effectively in providing evidence of operational resilience for claims as an important business service?
How DOCOsoft lines up
We’re partners, not vendors. The difference this makes shows in how we work with you every day: co-designing intuitive configurable workflows, monitoring the pipes, so your team doesn’t have to, resolving exceptions fast, and evolving the product in line with your ambitions through our community groups. Of course the technology matters. No one believes that more passionately than us. But it’s the service around it that keeps claims moving.
If you’d like to take a deeper dive into our monitoring, integrations (including GEMINI), or community approach — or if you’d like to pressure-test your current support model — let’s talk. We’re happy to share playbooks, dashboards, and real-world metrics, so you can benchmark service with confidence.