Easier Claims Management Coming to Partners Life

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Partners Life is to speed up its life insurance and medical claims processes with an automated system from international software company Fineos.

Kris Ballantyne, the insurer’s Chief Marketing Officer, says the Fineos cloud-based platform will allow the firm’s clients and advisers to lodge all claims online.

While the digital lodgement of claims is well established for health insurance, Ballantyne believes Partners Life will be among the first to have this kind of system for risk claims.

“It will save a lot of time in terms of paperwork and manually pulling together requests for information,” he says.

The company’s goal, says Ballantyne, is to significantly cut down claim processing times, ensure consistency of decisions, and increase transparency.

It will save a lot of time in terms of paperwork…

“When we started the firm 10 years ago we went straight to a cloud-based platform and this has been one of the reasons we have been so successful over the years,” he says. “It has allowed us to be efficient and scale up our systems and capabilities as required.

“There is no one in New Zealand, or actually in most markets, that has digital lodgement and assessment for risk claims. And that’s where we aspire to be. We want to make the whole claims process for all products and benefits consistent so that you don’t have a delineation between medical claims – which are straight forward – and risk claims which can be more complex.”

Ballantyne says the firm started researching for a claims processing vendor two years ago, but that progress was delayed by disruptions caused by Covid-19.

“It has been a lengthy process, and we have looked at systems from all over the world,” says Ballantyne. “We are confident Fineos is right up there in both what it can do right off the shelf, and also where its technology will let it go in the future.”

Ballantyne expects the new system to be up and running in 2022.

Project lead for the selection and implementation of the system is Partners Life Chief Claims Officer Tracey Lonergan.