Insurance · Regulated workflow transformation · 2011–2013
Taking insurance applications from four days to thirty minutes
Fidelity Life ran a multi-year digital transformation to support major growth and market expansion. Skowak designed the core product and workflow systems: underwriting, case management, product approval, and the operational tooling around them.
01
Problem
Life insurance application processing is a chain of dependent judgments eligibility rules, underwriting criteria, approval authority, compliance checks each held by a different role and governed by rules that change per product and per state. Straightforward applications moved at the speed of the slowest handoff, taking two to four days.
02
Approach
Skowak modelled the rule system first, separating decisions that genuinely required human underwriting judgment from those that were deterministic and merely being done by hand. The deterministic path became RapidApp a streamlined workflow for eligible applications. The judgment path kept humans in control but gave them better instrumentation.
Separately, Skowak designed Product Config, which let the business configure new insurance products directly rather than routing every change through engineering.
03
Impact
- Eligible application cycles reduced from 2–4 days to 20–30 minutes
- Product setup effort reduced by approximately 65%
- Supported a multi-year transformation underpinning significant company growth and market expansion
04
What made it work
The gain came from correctly separating what needed a human from what only had a human because nobody had modelled the rules. That distinction is exactly the one that decides whether an AI automation project succeeds and it's a design question before it's an engineering one.
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