Company Profile
H.W. Kaufman Group is a global leader in specialty insurance. Its offices span North America, the U.K., Europe and UAE. The company employs thousands of professionals who conduct business in more than 90 countries worldwide. Privately held and operating under its third generation of family ownership, Kaufman has built its reputation on a longstanding belief in building mutually beneficial partnerships, while operating with integrity and committing to innovation.
Kaufman is organized in a manner than enables the company to swiftly adapt to market shifts, while consistently embracing cutting-edge technology that drives efficiency and sets new industry standards.
Business Drivers
Every day, Kaufman processes thousands of submissions from clients seeking specialty insurance quotes, many of which are delivered in unstructured formats.
“We get submissions in emails, handwritten documents, standard industry forms, and documents that may or may not be scanned cleanly,” said Rich Fusinski, SVP and CIO at Kaufman.
Upon receiving the submissions, Kaufman associates manually review the content and enter the data into their system of record before providing a quote. In an industry where the first quote often wins, timing is everything.
Kaufman’s IT team was then challenged to develop a solution that would streamline document processing and underwriting timelines via a seamless system that would serve as a driver of both cost savings and revenue generation.
“In specialty insurance, the fastest quote wins,” Fusinski said. “If we can put ourselves in a position to groom this unstructured data, extract the relevant information, and respond to our retail partners much more quickly, now we’re cooking with gas.”
The Challenge
The team set out to create this new engagement system using modern technologies like AI and automated data management workflows, but Kaufman had to overcome what seemed like an insurmountable challenge: migrating data from its legacy, outdated content management system to a modern platform that could facilitate those integrations.
“Legacy content management systems don’t necessarily play well with others,” Fusinski said. “With our old system, the content was stuck where it was. If your content is just sitting off on an island, it’s very difficult to deeply integrate it with these other technologies and extract value from it.”
After speaking with multiple vendors who had experience with Kaufman’s legacy platform, the team started to lose faith. “We didn’t have a way out. There were no traditional migration approaches that would work with this system, and it would have taken years to move all the critical data. That’s why companies often abandon their ideal state,” Fusinski said.
Before fully giving up on the project, Kaufman met DryvIQ, an intelligent data management platform company with more than a decade of successfully managing complex, large-scale enterprise file migrations.
“When we first heard of Kaufman’s challenge, our immediate response was, ‘No problem. We can solve that,’” said DryvIQ CEO Sean Nathaniel. “It was a no-brainer for us.”
For Kaufman, it sounded a little too good to be true.
“As a CIO, you get your heart broken a lot. So it’s a real challenge to keep an open mind,” Fusinski said. “It took a leap of faith on my part, because here you have a vendor sitting in front of you saying, ‘We can solve this problem that nobody else can seem to solve.’”
But DryvIQ was up to the task. “We recognized that, beyond solving their immediate pain point, which was getting this content trapped in a legacy system into a modern platform, there was so much value we could unlock for the business,” Nathaniel said.
The Solution
Partnering with Kaufman, DryvIQ developed a specialty integration to successfully access, analyze, and take action on Kaufman’s enterprise data – easily synchronizing billions of files from their legacy content management system into a new platform, applying custom metadata, and converting high-storage-utilization file types into smaller formats along the way.
“The migration went from being the biggest impediment preventing us from building this engagement system, to being the thing that I didn’t have to worry about at all,” Fusinski said.
With the migration out of the way, Fusinski and his team are modernizing their entire system of engagement and automating key aspects of the document lifecycle. “We now have the ability to build whatever we can dream of,” Fusinski said.
“With Kaufman, content platform modernization was just the first step of their journey,” Nathaniel said. “Now that this unstructured content is unlocked, there are so many opportunities to drive efficiency within the business using technology like AI.”
With DryvIQ already in place, Kaufman can now leverage the platform’s ability to automatically scan and classify reinsurance quote submissions received via email, extracting the most valuable and actionable data. This reduces the time and manual effort required to process those documents, which provides both significant cost savings and revenue growth for the organization.
The Results
From automating the process of grooming reinsurance quote submissions, Fusinski expects a seven-figure cost savings in human capital alone. By reducing the time it takes to provide a quote, Kaufman is able to increase its win rate, drive more business, and enhance client service.
“This is one of the easiest things we can do to drive business impact,” Fusinski said. “By shrinking that whole process down, we’re providing cost savings to the organization and delivering the expedient service that clients expect — DryvIQ is enabling that for us.”
But the success doesn’t end there. DryvIQ and Kaufman have partnered to pursue further data management enhancements, including the automation of data loss prevention and other data security measures.
“We’re doing some really great things with DryvIQ, by taking unstructured data and making it structured so that we can take action on it rapidly,” Fusinski said. “There are more opportunities out there. When you consider all the unstructured data challenges you face, I encourage you to see what DryvIQ can do for you.”
Empowering Success through Partnership
Kaufman’s success in unlocking efficiencies and new opportunities didn’t come from technology alone—it was the result of a true partnership with DryvIQ.
“DryvIQ never stopped asking questions,” said Fusinski. “They developed a deep understanding of our business and data. Together, we found solutions.”
This collaborative approach is central to DryvIQ’s methodology. “Solving complex content challenges requires technology, methodology, expertise, and hands-on collaboration,” added Nathaniel.
With their initial challenges solved, Kaufman and DryvIQ are now pursuing even greater opportunities together. “If you want to do something great, if you want to position your company as a leader, you have to take some calculated risks. Partnering with DryvIQ has allowed us to take some of those calculated risks, and it has paid off,” Fusinski said. “Now that we’ve addressed our initial challenges, we’ve identified several impactful use cases that we’re now engaging with DryvIQ, and they’re significant opportunities for us.”
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