TCLI - FWU - Insurance - Digitisation - 20201116

In an economic context featuring the adoption of teleworking, how has document digitisation enabled FWU LUX SA to come through the crisis with greater peace of mind?

I/ Presentation of FWU LUX SA

FWU is a specialised provider of life insurance and financial services in units of account, whose offering extends to IT systems and investment solutions in megadata and expertise in commissioning and refinancing. With 450,000 customers worldwide, 3 billion euros of assets under management and the Capital Finance International Prize for the best product portfolio in Units of Account, FWU is positioned as a global player in the life insurance sector.

Based in Munich since its creation in 1983, FWU has 12 offices from Kuala Lumpur to Madrid and 23 entities. These include two life insurance companies: FWU Life Insurance and FWU Life Austria, based in Luxembourg and Vienna.

II/ Requirement and objective

FWU Life Insurance Lux wanted to digitise its customers’ life insurance contracts in order to provide them in their computer tool. These contracts, stored in a building basement, were planned to be stored with an archiving service provider. Numen was therefore contacted specifically for the digitisation of files and the provision of digital documents to FWU.

In only 6 months, Numen processed 225,032 life insurance contracts, the equivalent of 10,000,000 pages. FWU benefited from the expertise and quality of Numen as a trusted partner in the digitisation of sensitive documents (documents that include personal data).

The documents were processed in several stages:

1. Centralisation of contracts on a Numen digitisation site.
   • Logistical complexity: throughout the project, the contracts were collected by the company Streff for storage and inventorying in their warehouse. There was much toing and froing between Streff and Numen Europe.
2. Preparation made for each contract: opening, extracting, placing flat, sorting documents according to category, adding a QR code for each category and digitising the life insurance contracts.
3. Contract indexing based on the QR Code.
   • Essential stage: indexing enables searching in the computer tool.
4. Exhaustiveness check (presence of all the documents expected).
5. Compliance check (compliance of documents in relation to the special conditions).

The files were then made available via an SFTP secure file transfer protocol for FWU’s Electronic Document Management (EDM) tool. Throughout the duration of the digitisation project, a daily report was sent to indicate the progress and the files that had been transferred.

III/ The benefits of customer file digitisation

The digitisation of FWU SA’s customer files was beneficial on several levels:

• Improved overall efficiency of the process with the switch to digital;
• Reduced life insurance file production costs;
• Document management optimisation.

Thanks to the quality of the work carried out by the Numen teams, FWU only suffered very low impact from the pandemic in Luxembourg. Immediate access to dematerialised contracts enabled business to carry on as usual, despite the lockdown and working from home.