Robot helps insurer Assuria process payments quickly and efficiently

As a financial services company, how can you still keep working quickly and efficiently when the number of transactions continues to grow rapidly, without constantly hiring additional staff? The Surinamese insurer Assuria has addressed that challenge by working with Tacstone Technology to implement Robotic Process Automation (RPA) to process remittances.

Insurance company Assuria operates in Suriname, Guyana, Trinidad & Tobago and most recently Curaçao. The company has been in existence for 34 years now, and offers various types of insurance, including travel, auto, health, life and savings insurance. It is the largest insurer in Suriname, with ancillary activities in real estate and other financial services.

With smart technology, Assuria continues to lead the way. For example, a digital assistant takes care of processing transactions with five major banks, a process that previously required a lot of time-consuming manual work. “We saw an increasing trend in digital remittances, such as online banking, and manual processing started taking more and more time,” says Maresa Mohan, at Assuria.

Workload

She continues: “That workload was getting heavier and heavier. Because there was a fixed pattern in the way those processing were done, we started looking at automating that process. Tacstone Technology, which was already active in the financial sector in Suriname, then let us know what was possible with a robot. Based on that, we started working together to automate this process with RPA from UiPath.”

The implementation of RPA began with fully describing the process the bank processor performs. “This involved all operations, step-by-step, including copy and paste. Based on that, Tacstone developed the script so that the robot could precisely mimic each operation in our systems.” Tacstone also provided advice on parts of the process that could be optimized.

Staff

A key focus, according to Mohan, was making sure employees were willing to work with the robot, which was named Surya. “If something doesn’t go right, with a human colleague you can quickly figure out why it went wrong. With a robot, you have to figure out exactly what went wrong, what action the robot performed and why that led to a wrong result. Then you have to adjust and refine the robot to achieve the desired result.”

So Assuria has paid a lot of attention to the cooperation between human and robot. Lindsay Mangoensentono, manager of the department where the robot came to work, says, “It was a matter of getting used to it. Nobody likes change, so there was definitely a period of getting used to it.”

“Although the robot automates manual operations, the employee is still responsible for checking: you check to see if the robot has done the job correctly and pick up what the robot has not been able to handle.”

Maresa Mohan | Senior Officer Financial Processing at Assuria

Robot processes 80%

“The goal is to lighten the workload. This was positive for some employees, but a little less so for others. It is a change within the organization that affected not only the finance department, but also other departments that had to learn to deal with Surya. Feedback was given both on errors and successful processing. It was really a process, but it took a lot of work off our hands. Currently, about eighty percent of our remittances are processed by Surya. So we have absolutely no regrets.”

The robot now processes transactions from five major banks simultaneously. Surya runs 24 hours a day, including weekends. In total, several thousand transactions no longer need to be processed manually. Su-Yin Klint, project manager in Assuria’s ICT department, says, “This result was achieved partly by involving our customers, by explaining what information they need to include, such as the policy or insurance number.”

“That behavioral change took time, but now it is improving. As a result, Surya is functioning very effectively.”

Su-Yin Klint | Project manager at the ICT department of Assuria

Performing tasks independently

Thanks to the robot, the workload does not go up when employees retire, for example. Mangoensentono: “Right now there are seven or eight people working on this process. The goal is to eventually reduce that to five, one for each bank. We continue to improve the robot whenever possible. If we notice that a task can be performed more easily, we adjust the system accordingly. We are trying to get the robot to perform more and more tasks independently.”

She says of the cooperation with Tacstone, “We found it very pleasant. They were quick to respond and came up with suggestions on where improvements could be made or what could be handled differently.

“We are now investigating whether, in addition to processing payments, we can deploy RPA in other areas of the organization. Some proposals have already been made for this. We still need to invest more time in this, but we have the resources and capabilities and know what can be done with RPA.”

Do you, like Assuria also want to get acquainted with RPA, AI or Low-code? And discover what benefits it offers your organization? Then contact us for an introduction and/or demo.