|---Module:text|Size:Small---| Even though we live in an increasingly digital world, many industries still operate through manual inefficient workflows, collecting information from forms and emails, then spending hours extracting and entering it into their systems.
This is particularly noticeable in traditional industries such as insurance, banking, and manufacturing, where legacy systems and long-established procedures remain deeply ingrained. The challenge is even greater for large, long-standing organisations operating across multiple countries, where each region often follows its own processes and standards.
Simplifying complexity: the underwriting challenge
Within this context, Hiscox Europe approached Celfocus with a clear challenge - how could the underwriting process be optimised?
Their underwriters were receiving a constant flow of new business proposals from multiple brokers, delivered through a mix of emails and forms. To make matters more complex, both the forms and insurance products varied by country, reflecting local regulations and market differences. This meant valuable time was being spent manually extracting, reviewing, and re-entering data, a time-consuming, error-prone workflow that limited efficiency and slowed down decision-making.
To address this challenge, Celfocus worked closely with Hiscox Europe to understand the end-to-end underwriting journey, from how information was received to how decisions were made. Through this collaboration, Celfocus identified key pain points and opportunities for automation, focusing on reducing manual data handling and improving the flow of information between brokers and underwriters.
Empowering teams with AI and Automation
Leveraging the power of Artificial Intelligence, particularly Generative AI and OCR-based models, Celfocus designed a solution capable of interpreting and standardising information from diverse formats and languages. The goal was clear: to create a unified, intelligent process that empowers underwriters to handle information more efficiently, while maintaining the accuracy, compliance, and oversight that the insurance business demands, and scaling seamlessly across multiple countries and product lines.
The solution includes a dedicated frontend where underwriters can interact with the system in a simple, intuitive way. This interface serves as the central workspace where all the information collected from emails and forms is consolidated, reviewed, and validated before being passed downstream to other internal systems.
Every new proposal begins the same way: an underwriter receives an email, often accompanied by an attached form. These incoming documents are captured and routed through the appropriate processing lane, depending on their structure and content.
- Structured Lane: Processing Forms - When a form is detected, the solution leverages Microsoft Azure Document Intelligence to extract the data directly from the document. This powerful OCR-based technology identifies and captures the filled-in fields – such as client details, coverage amounts, or product specifications – and converts them into structured data that can be easily validated and processed. By automating this task, underwriters no longer need to manually retype information, drastically reducing the time spent on repetitive, low-value work.
- Unstructured Lane: Understanding Emails with Generative AI - For proposals received directly in the body of an email, the solution employs GenAI to interpret unstructured text. The system first identifies which insurance product the message refers to. Once the product is recognised, the system dynamically determines the relevant fields and data points associated with that product and resorts to GenAI to extract them from the email’s content. This approach allows the system to handle the wide variability in how brokers communicate, ensuring flexibility and adaptability without requiring rigid templates or manual classification.
- Reconciliation and Validation - In many cases, underwriters receive both an email and an attached form referring to the same proposal. To handle this scenario, Celfocus implemented a reconciliation layer that aggregates the information extracted from both sources, checks for consistency, and highlights any conflicts or missing data. This step ensures that only validated, coherent information reaches the underwriter through the frontend, while still giving users visibility and control over the final output.
The result is a unified, intelligent flow that combines AI-based automation with human validation, striking the right balance between efficiency and reliability.
Creating measurable business value
While the solution was designed to address a specific operational challenge, its impact goes far beyond streamlining the underwriting process. By bringing structure to unstructured data and harmonising processes across multiple countries and product lines, Hiscox Europe can now focus its underwriters’ expertise where it truly matters: evaluating risk and delivering value to customers.
At the same time, the solution establishes a solid foundation for scalable, sustainable transformation. Built on a modular, cloud-native architecture, it is designed to evolve as the business grows, supporting new products, markets, and AI-driven capabilities without major rework. By combining automation, intelligence, and flexibility, Celfocus and Hiscox Europe have created a platform that delivers measurable efficiency today while setting the stage for continuous innovation tomorrow.
- Scalability: Because the platform is cloud-native and built around microservices, it can easily adapt to fluctuations in demand. If underwriting volumes increase unexpectedly, the system automatically scales to handle the additional load. Likewise, if a new product line is introduced or a new market is added, these can be onboarded with minimal effort. This architecture ensures that the platform grows seamlessly with the business, without requiring heavy rework or operational downtime.
- Traceability and Transparency: Automation only delivers real value when it is trustworthy. That’s why monitoring, observability, and auditability were embedded from the very beginning. Every action, from data extraction to validation, can be tracked end to end. This makes compliance and auditing straightforward while enabling teams to continuously optimise performance and quality.
- Future Readiness: The platform was designed with modularity and reusability at its core. Each component – from AI models to processing lanes – can be adapted and reused across other business areas or geographies. This ensures that the investment made today extends its value over time. As new markets, products, or even entirely new AI-driven capabilities are introduced, the same architecture can evolve to support them, ensuring long-term adaptability and sustained innovation.
Results: measurable impact
In the first phase of the project, focusing on form processing in a single country, the results were already significant. 66% of requests were processed successfully end to end, while the remaining 34% were pre-populated and required only minimal user intervention to complete missing information or correct extracted fields. This marks a significant step toward a more efficient underwriting process, where AI and automation enhance speed and accuracy, but final decisions remain guided by human expertise.
Conclusion: a strategic platform for continuous innovation
What began as an initiative to optimise underwriting has evolved into a strategic platform that enables Hiscox Europe to operate smarter and innovate faster. By combining automation, AI, and human expertise, the solution not only accelerates day-to-day operations but also redefines how digital transformation can drive business value in traditional industries.
Through this collaboration, Celfocus and Hiscox Europe have proven that intelligent automation is more than a productivity tool - it’s an enabler of growth and adaptability. The same architecture and AI capabilities that power this solution can now be extended to other geographies, products, and use cases, accelerating the journey toward an efficient digital underwriting experience.
