From 5–6 Days to Near-Instant Policy Activation

Business requirement

• Once a quote was approved, activating the policy required manual hand-offs across underwriting, compliance, billing, and policy administration—each waiting on the previous team to finish before picking up the case.
• A single policy could take 5–6 days to go from approved quote to active coverage.
• There was no automatic way to route a case backward if a department found an issue.

Our solution

We designed an event-driven workflow using microservices and SQL Server Service Broker so each department could publish completion events and the next team could pick up the case automatically.

• Each department's system publishes an event when its step is complete, and the next department's service subscribes and continues the case without a manual hand-off.
• If a department flags an issue, the case is automatically routed backward to the responsible team instead of sitting in an inbox waiting to be reassigned.

Business outcomes

• Policy activation time cut from 5–6 days to near-instant for standard cases.
• Automatic forward and backward routing eliminated manual hand-offs between departments.
• A full audit trail of every department's decision on a case, since each step is a logged event.

Part of a 5+ year ongoing engineering partnership with this client. References available on request.

Part of the same partnership

• Modernizing Life and Group Insurance Operations
• Automating Manual Underwriting Decisioning

Tools & technologies

Architecture

Microservices

Messaging

SQL Server Service Broker (event-driven decisioning)

• Microservices
• SQL Server Service Broker