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Seamlessly scaled to 22 new mailboxes and over 1000 new forms processed

Reduced document processing time to under 2 hours

Flexible CBS mail-house solution for future changes

Transitioning acquired mailroom operations to a tight deadline.

AIA Group is the largest publicly listed life insurance and securities group in the Asia Pacific region. It works closely with major financial institutions, corporate partners, financial advisers, and affinity partners to deliver relevant insurance products that protect what its customers value most.
 
A longstanding Canon Business Services (CBS) customer since 2010, AIA acquired the Commonwealth Bank of Australia’s insurance arm, Comminsure, in 2018 and began the process of transitioning to the AIA Australia business in July 2019.

When it came time to take over shared service functions as part of this transition, AIA turned to CBS’ industry experience to support a knowledge transfer from CBA and integrate a fit-for-purpose solution for its new mail-house operations.

Challenge

When AIA acquired Comminsure from CBA, it had a short timeframe to transition complex Comminsure’s mail-house operations in house. A working solution had to be found fast despite limited access to Comminsure’s existing processes and data. 

“It was a challenging transfer because we were going into the project blind. It required extensive input and access to systems and knowledge from CBA as a third party, rather than just working out what we needed to do with CBS directly. But we’d built a strong relationship with CBS over almost a decade and knew the team could handle the extra complexity and deliver.”

Senior Manager – Shared Services, AIA 

Focused on getting it done.

AIA had engaged CBS to deliver a similar mail digitisation solution for its newly acquired insurance business, CMLA. The solution incorporated our cognitive capture techniques to intelligently process any document type received. 

Effectively, all of AIA’s physical mail is now routed via CBS for processing, digitisation, and data capture, then routed directly into AIA’s workflow for AIA staff to action within 2 hours.

AIA’s Comminsure acquisition meant integrating an entirely new business’ technology, people, and process into its existing mail-house, expanding a single mailbox to 23, covering 190 different products and adding over a thousand different insurance forms to AIA’s workflow.

“We were still learning about the systems and processes we’d inherited from Comminsure and often didn’t even have access to the information or service we were trying to replace. CBS really had to adapt and develop a mail digitisation solution on the fly,” says AIA's Senior Manager. “We engaged the CBS team in July 2020 and required a solution to test by January 4, 2021, and roll out by April 2021, so they had to translate an extremely complex project into an elegant design solution fast.” 

“The CBS team essentially blended into the project, taking the time constraints in their stride with a flexible, accommodating approach that just made everything easier,” AIA's Senior Manager says. “And that was a standout for us—the project was difficult enough but having CBS on board meant we never had to worry. We had confidence that CBS would deliver.

Looking forward to a seamless solution delivered ahead of time.

CBS underwent an extensive discovery process, ensuring we invested the time to understand the project mandate, the processes to integrate, and applied quality project governance to manage expectations so we could deliver a great outcome for AIA.

We used our expertise in mail digitisation solutions and experience providing a similar service to AIA to make sure the transition was seamless for Comminsure’s existing clients.

“Despite time pressures, missing project parameters, and access issues, CBS’ flexible, can-do approach really came to the fore,” says their Senior Manager. “It was a relief knowing we could drop information on them at the last minute that would change the aspects of the solution, and they’d find a workaround.”

Solution

CBS spent time in discovery and managed the whole transition process. We designed an iterative solution to allow AIA to adjust elements in the testing phase as new information comes to light.
CBS delivers digital mail, outbound print, and fulfillment services from our Melbourne Technology Centre. This includes: 
  1. Clearing GPO box mail of incoming AIA Australia correspondence 
  2. Preparing forms for scanning
  3. Creating a digital image via high-speed track scanners
  4. Capturing required metadata
  5. Validating forms in accordance with AIA requirements for processing
  6. Validation is supported by predefined business rules aided by the ingestion of policy data supplied by AIA 
  7. Exceptions are identified as a hosted via a web application for resolution
Exporting validated forms are to AIA content management system.

AIA had engaged CBS to provide similar services for its CMLA insurance documents, incorporating our cognitive capture techniques to intelligently process any document type through our systems. 

To fulfill CMLA workstream requirements our Sydney Technology Centre in Macquarie Park:  
  1. Receives, opens, sorts, and prepares physical mail for scanning. We register cheques and registered post for tracking while non-scannable mail is returned to AIA. 
  2. Manages the ‘Return to Sender’ process
  3. Scans and digitises prepared items 
  4. Indexes documents according to AIA requirements 
  5. Exports images and metadata as per AIA’s schema
  6. Archives physical mail
  7. Manages and resolves exception processes e.g., re-scan requests
  8. Back-scans documents sent by AIA 
  9. Actions Helpdesk requests
  10. Regular BAU Reporting.

"The real shining light was that CBS made our tight timeframe doable. In fact, they were ahead of the game at every milestone, they knew the roadmap, and we were ready to go when promised, even when other service providers weren’t. Even when it seems impossible, these guys will find a way. They come to the conversation with a solution mindset. A statement of work doesn’t constrain them—if you have a problem, they’re looking to how they can solve it first and foremost.”

Senior Manager – Shared Services, AIA 

Thriving with flexibility to adapt and grow.

CBS final mail-house solution has flexibility built in so the AIA team can make changes as new process information comes to light in practice.
“With so many products and forms, we knew our initial document mapping would need updating as we tested the solution. CBS’ challenge was how to build a solution that was flexible enough to allow AIA to make rapid changes during the first month of going live,” AIA's Senior Manager explains. “We were really fortunate CBS’ solution meant we didn’t have to worry—they said, ‘we’re going to build a solution that gives you control to fix it on the fly.’ I like it when people can admit they won’t know everything. The solution is never going to be perfect. But it can be close to perfect if you allow for it to be iterative.” 

“Working with CBS is definitely like a partnership. They’re able to cut through the layers and just get stuff done,” he adds. They go beyond because they try to understand your business, and they’re great at relationships and support. They’re also very stable—the service just works in the background, so you can focus more on what’s next.”
 

Benefits

AIA has successfully taken over Comminsure’s mail-house operations, with CBS taking care of data capture, digitisation and rerouting to AIA’s workflows for action within 2 hours. The solution works seamlessly in the background, allowing AIA to focus on driving growth.

1000+ insurance forms in workflow

25+ years experience

95% customer satisfaction

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