Compliance and Document Management

Businesses benefit in so many ways from implementing technology to help them observe compliance processes and procedures, to manage and control the level of risk faced by the business.

However doing so either by building a system in-house, or using an application that is not purpose built for document management, has often proved at best inefficient, and at worst in-effective, and consequently highly costly in time and money.

Amongst the challenges faced by Brokers (and in many cases businesses in general) with compliance, key ones include:

1. Organising the business for efficient operation
   • Organising files for efficient Business-As-Usual operation:
     • Reducing the cost of audit & compliance
     • In the event of a divisional sale can reduce the cost of business separation
   • Businesses with well organised filing systems are more likely to enjoy a lower E&O risk rating
   • While organising by Insured name may appear obvious those names can change whereas organising by UMR will not change and the Insured name can be stored as a meta-data attribute of the UMR
2. Protecting the business in the event of a request for document disclosure:
   • Segregating/containing documents needing to be disclosed for example by filing correspondence separately for each of:
     • Insureds
     • Brokers
     • Underwriters
     • Third Party Administrators
     • Internal working correspondence
3. Ensuring email attachments are as easily locatable as their email containers:
   • For example the system should automatically separate out and index email attachments
4. Controlling internal and third-party access to documents:
   • Having a rigid Chinese-wall approach whereby system users’ access is strictly controlled by role/policy

All this adds up to ensuring that, for example in the event of legal action against the business that requires document disclosure, the business can demonstrate it has applied compliance best practice and its position will be easier to defend and therefore lower in cost (for example in terms of forensic legal services). As an example The Griffin Insurance Association can offer independent advice to its members on these and related matters.

Addressing the above either by building a system in-house or using an application that is not purpose built for document management has often proved at best inefficient, and at worst in-effective and consequently costly.

TIW’s hosted Document Management System (DMS) supports all of the above and integrates with existing desktop office tools. Being a commercial system it does not require dedicated in-house resource to design, build, test, manage and maintain therefore is cost effective to have.