General Insurance Article - Over 80% of Lloyd’s claims now on ECF

 The percentage of new insurance claims being managed using ECF – the London insurance market’s Electronic Claims File system – has reached 83% within the Lloyd’s market, a rise of 8% on this time last year.

 Newly-published figures for the companies market show ECF being used for 71% of all new claims, a rise of 13% over the last calendar year.

 Transactions are also speeding up, the data reveals. According to the market’s ECF User Group, 2011 saw a 15% improvement in end-to-end transaction processing time.

 The figures come as the initial roll out of ECF2 across the market reaches its conclusion and a detailed assessment of its performance gets under way.

 Robert Gregg, chair of the ECF User Group and senior claims executive at the Lloyd’s Market Association said:

 “ECF2 is very nearly there now. All elements of the system have been rolled out and we are now obtaining feedback from the market’s users with a view to fine-tuning the system and introducing change requests to enhance usability, functionality and process. The ECF User Group has prioritised 14 changes that have now moved to an analysis phase. One of our major examples of this is to ensure the recognition and conversion of embedded documents within emails utilising the Document File Viewer.

 “With 83% of all Lloyd’s new claims being processed using the system we’ve made considerable advances but there is still a little way to go. An enhanced system solution will be required to achieve the 100% target and discussions are under way to investigate potential suppliers.”

 Every month, around 40,000 claims transactions are being created and completed using the ECF system.

 ECF stands for electronic claims files.