MIB

The Motor Insurers’ Bureau (MIB) has PacSol’s information management system integrated with the bespoke MIB Claims System.

MIB was established in 1946 as a private company limited by guarantee for the purpose of entering into Agreements with the Government to compensate the victims of negligent uninsured and untraced motorists. Every insurer underwriting compulsory motor insurance is obliged, by virtue of the Road Traffic Act 1988, to be a member of MIB and to contribute to its funding.

MIB’s claims operation has always been extremely paper intensive since the majority of the claims are referrals from solicitors. There are now over 80,000 active claims and the sheer administration of the vast volumes of paper that relate to these claims had become a logistical nightmare. MIB had also come to realise that vital information (including forms, letters, photographs and faxes), on which its business is dependent is currently being held on paper, which is one of the most vulnerable types of media. It perishes easily, is not generally backed up, can only be accessed by one person at a time, requires a certain amount of physical effort for distribution and collection and is very bulky and takes up vital office space for storage. The high costs associated with the administration of all this paper coupled with the need to increase the efficiency and security of its operation led MIB to investigate ways of automating this process. What MIB really wanted was for the agents to be able to access all the claims related information directly from their desktops whilst working with the claims application.

PacSol’s document management and workflow products were selected as they could provide just the sort of efficiency increases that were required, as had already been demonstrated by the use of the systems for claims processing at Legal & General Insurance. Another key factor was the ability of the systems to easily integrate with the existing MIB claims system.

The first phase of the project was to provide full document management capabilities to the claims system. All claim related information such as scanned correspondence, photographs, emails and internally generated letters is now included into the system in such a way that it is available from any of the 150 claims processors’ desktops. They now have immediate access to all documentation from within the claims system; by just pressing a key they can view any document image on the screen alongside the related claim details.

4 Kodak scanners are used to scan over 400,000 documents per month relating to the 6,000 new claims. The ability to have instant access to the documents will have a significant impact on the amount of time spent chasing the paper files, never mind the amount of space needed to store the files. There are also plans to provide the loss adjusters with remote access to these electronic documents.

The Project Controller for MIB, who is responsible for the day-to-day management of the system and was part of the management team set up to select a suitable supplier says ‘since the implementation of the PacSol solution we have seen a big advantage to the claims handlers when they take phone calls as they can now access all paper documents immediately from their screens’. The implementation of the system has improved their customer service, reduced call times and reduced the cost associated with handling each claim.

And adds, ‘We now provide a more efficient and productive service to our customers which is vital since it is funded by our members’.
This project demonstrates, once again, the value of the PacSol systems to the insurance industry and is a particularly good reference for future projects within the claims environment, particularly from the motor insurance sector.