Retro Life Assurance Company Ltd (founded in 1919) is jointly owned by several Finnish life insurance companies. Retro provides them with services including reinsurance for life insurance risks; risk assessment; international reinsurance and other support functions.
Retro also manages the Employees' Group Life Assurance Pool (founded in 1977). Finland's central labor market organizations have agreed on the provision of group life insurance coverage for employees, and the coverage extends to almost all Finnish employees whose employment falls under the country's employment insurance laws.
Previously, the handling and payment of employee group life insurance claims was based on paper documents and manual process management. The amount of manual stages in the work had become excessive. Retro needed a solution that would electronically manage the documents related to the claims, and integrate data from various sources directly into the handling process.
Retro and Attido – operating at the time as Nordic Solutions – launched a project that aimed to streamline the claims management process, while improving its quality and providing easier monitoring.
Attido took responsibility for the supervision, planning, execution and implementation of the project, as well as the management of the new system. The project was kicked off in June 2008, and the solution was scheduled for production use in early 2009.
In the project, Attido created a system for managing the processing and payments of employee group life insurance claims. This requires integration and easy access to data from various external information systems. Additionally, the aim was to replace the handling of paper documents with an electronic alternative.
No documentation of the required process or the application area existed previously, which is why the project was carried out in short iteration cycles, based on agile development methods. The aim was to find the optimal balance between documentation, planning and the actual creation of the new software.
Business experts and software developers collaborated closely throughout the entire project. The influence of individual employees and their interpersonal skills was significant in the successful completion of the task. The collaboration was very smooth and the new system was launched in January 2009. Production use began the following month.
By late 2010, the system had been used to process some 3,500 claims, which resulted in 4,600 individual compensation decisions and over 50 million euros in benefits paid.
"Attido has proven itself as a reliable and knowledgeable software development partner. We have been very happy with both the results of the project and our overall cooperation,", says Mika Mäkinen, CEO, Retro Life Assurance Company Ltd.
In addition to the system for processing employee group life insurance claims, Attido has completed several additional projects with Retro. These include:
The claims processing system is implemented as an ASP .NET application on the Windows Server 2008 platform, using Microsoft Internet Information Server 7 (IIS) and MS SQL Server 2008. Document management is based on Microsoft's Windows SharePoint Services (WSS).
The system has been integrated with the Population Register Center's VTJ query service as well as data services from the Finnish Centre for Pensions. Additionally, Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) was used to create a workstation application for converting forms and attachments into electronic format, and for integrating these documents into the claims being handled.
As the data in the system contains sensitive personal information, data security is paramount in both the design of the system and the user environment.