LSA Courtage: Speeding up document ingestion for faster, more efficient insurance approvals

About LSA Courtage

The LSA Courtage group offers a range of insurance products, specializing in car insurance and offering a "drive insured within the hour" service.

Industries: Financial Services & Insurance
Location: France

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About Tersea

Tersea group offers services to optimize customer relationship operations and increase performance and satisfaction and prides itself on its ability to design tailored solutions and develop innovative custom tools.

LSA Courtage and Tersea use Google Cloud Vision to recognize text and automate document ingestion processes, increasing efficiency and growing underwriter productivity by 20%.

Google Cloud results

  • Ingests text automatically using Cloud Vision enabling faster agent verification, reducing time per page by 45%
  • Integrates easily into a data pipeline that combines automation with agent input, maintaining high reliability
  • Improves system accuracy progressively by using processed data to train the OCR model for faster text recognition

Underwriter productivity up 20%

As services become more automated, customers expect requests to be processed quickly, especially if they are looking to be insured and on the road as quickly as possible. Through a portfolio of brands including Assurpeople, French insurance group LSA Courtage, together with its outsourcing partner Tersea, answers this need — providing car insurance products in under one hour. It specializes in insuring customers who may otherwise struggle because of previous accidents or other elevated risks — a category known as substandard motor underwriting.

"As we are a managing general agent rather than just a broker, we are able to accept customers on behalf of our underwriting partners and work with our own tools and processes," says Bertrand Liber, CEO of LSA Courtage. "LSA Courtage is a leader in France in terms of insurance digitalization as we created our first website in 1996. We offered online underwriting as early as 2007, went mobile in 2011, and first started using AI for our predictive scoring in 2015. Our clients increasingly expect to access services via digital interaction, in fact 60 percent of our new car insurance business is online, with a third of that on mobile devices."

"There are several factors driving our digital transformation at the moment. It's the speed of our response that differentiates LSA Courtage. The French insurance market is very competitive with a lot of pressure on margins, so we need to constantly improve productivity."

Bertrand Liber, CEO, LSA Courtage

In order to process and confirm new customers' details, LSA Courtage's employees were spending time inputting and verifying supporting documents manually. With its customer relations and services management partner Tersea, LSA Courtage looked for a way of speeding up this task by automating text ingestion. They chose Cloud Vision on Google Cloud as the best tool for the job.

"There are several factors driving our digital transformation at the moment," says Bertrand. "It's the speed of our response that differentiates LSA Courtage. The French insurance market is very competitive with a lot of pressure on margins, so we need to constantly improve productivity."

Speeding up document verification

To enable underwriters to perform their tasks efficiently, they need the right tools for the job. Automating data entry processes can help underwriters to work faster and more accurately. "In France, there are no centralized databases holding key driver data, so documents relating to a particular insurance application have to be submitted and processed individually," says Bertrand. "This was taking up a lot of time, so we looked for a way to automatically extract data from driving licenses, registration papers, and other documents, to speed up the validation process before it entered our system."

To do that, LSA Courtage and its partner Tersea built an automatic text recognition and data ingestion pipeline using Google Cloud Vision. "We worked with Tersea to develop a more secure pipeline and a user interface for the agents," says Bertrand. "The documents are either emailed as scans or uploaded to a self-service customer website, ready to enter the processing pipeline using Cloud Vision. The quality of the documents submitted is very variable, and the system needs to be able to deal with six main different document types in various shapes and forms."

"Reliability is paramount as, based on the data, we make decisions regarding insurance risk. Cloud Vision progressively trains itself over time, so the more you use it, the more accurate it becomes, and the less time our agents need to spend adjusting the inputs."

Bertrand Liber, CEO, LSA Courtage

"We use an open source Optical Character Recognition API alongside Google Cloud Vision and compare the results," Bertrand explains. "If both tools output the same result, we consider it sufficiently reliable to pass on to the next stage. The interface automatically highlights any data that is missing or needs checking, and then the agent can easily complete and validate the submission."

"As well as speeding up data input into the system, we have also built an interface where the data ingested via Cloud Vision is automatically compared to the data submitted by a client, so our underwriters can immediately detect discrepancies,” says Bertrand. "They can, therefore, concentrate on data that does not match, whereas previously they would have had to visually compare every entry."

"Reliability is paramount as, based on the data, we make decisions regarding insurance risk," adds Bertrand. "Cloud Vision progressively trains itself over time, so the more you use it, the more accurate it becomes, and the less time our agents need to spend adjusting the inputs."

Improving productivity, safeguarding jobs

While it also has employees in Morocco through its partner Tersea, maintaining jobs in France is an important part of LSA Courtage's corporate responsibility ethos. "Increasing productivity is important, because of the financial pressures we face," says Bertrand. "Certain competitors have migrated their entire operational workforce outside France, but our aim is to maintain as many jobs as possible in our Rueil offices outside Paris."

"The agents spend the minimum time possible on data validation, which has accelerated the rhythm of document processing and the flow of information into our own tools. We can offer a better service to our clients, because we process their new business cases faster."

Bertrand Liber, CEO, LSA Courtage

"I want LSA Courtage to offer a wide range of job opportunities and support diverse employment within French society," Bertrand explains. "By optimizing our processes using new technology, we can afford to make that choice while maintaining our margins."

More ways to speed up administration

LSA Courtage agents now process around 1,500 documents a day using the data pipeline and Google Cloud Vision. "Since implementing the pipeline, the average time that an administrator spends on a single document has gone down by 45 percent, and the productivity of the underwriters has risen by 20 percent" says Bertrand. "The agents spend the minimum time possible on data validation, which has accelerated the rhythm of document processing and the flow of information into our own tools. We can offer a better service to our clients, because we process their new business cases faster."

Now, LSA Courtage is looking to further optimize its processes using Cloud Speech-to-Text, and is also exploring how Cloud Natural Language could offer its marketing team insights into online customer feedback.

"Our work with Cloud Vision shows that you don't have to be a huge corporation to benefit from the optimizations Google Cloud offers, as it's so easy to work with," says Bertrand. "You just need a clear vision of the business challenge you're looking to solve."

Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.

Contact us

About LSA Courtage

The LSA Courtage group offers a range of insurance products, specializing in car insurance and offering a "drive insured within the hour" service.

Industries: Financial Services & Insurance
Location: France

About Tersea

Tersea group offers services to optimize customer relationship operations and increase performance and satisfaction and prides itself on its ability to design tailored solutions and develop innovative custom tools.