John Hancock - Support Team of the Year

Company: John Hancock, Boston, MA
Company Description: John Hancock's core retail products in the U.S. focus on providing financial solutions at every stage of our clients' lives. Our product suite includes life insurance, mutual funds, 401(k) plans, long-term care insurance, and annuities. We distribute our products primarily through licensed financial advisors, and through John Hancock Financial Network, a national network of independent firms.
Nomination Category: Support Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Support Team of the Year

Nomination Title: The Emerging Technologies Team

Today’s clients increasingly expect seamless user experiences through the offering of a broad range of digital capabilities and platforms. If Amazon can be a one-touch experience, why should the insurance industry be different? In our technocentric world this means the use of mobile applications, chat bots, robotic automation, and AI virtual assistants, all of which driving a digital interaction model with our clients and an automated experience for the transactional processing. To meet this demand, Manulife’s CEO Roy Gori has set an aggressive goal for our organization and tasked the company with achieving 80% Straight-through Processing (STP) automation by 2022. That is, the percentage of a given transaction from start to finish that does not require manual intervention.

We have spent the last 5 years building a very mature global robotics program which has implemented hundreds of Robotic Processing Automations (RPA) throughout John Hancock and our parent corporation Manulife. However, John Hancock alone receives over 10 million pages of client correspondence via mail or fax each year. Receiving requests in this antiquated fashion creates a gap in end-to-end automation that can’t be solved for with RPA alone. RPA bots do not have the ability to read text or understand scanned images. They rely on human eyes to read the client request and perform manual data entry tasks.

To solve for this digitization gap, we sought out to better understand the data capture capability market. Data capture platforms, historically referred to as Optical Character Recognition or “OCR,” combines some version of OCR with multiple other technologies including Machine Learning, Natural Language Understanding, and Artificial Intelligence. All of which to create a proprietary recipe to intelligently extract semi-structured or unstructured data that’s hidden in electronic documents and images. Further, the platform would conceivably transform that data into a structured format which can then be passed off to RPA bots to achieve end-to-end automation.

The Emerging Technologies Team as part of the Global Robotics CoE was tasked with sourcing a tool that would deliver these capabilities. Solving for this gap in our service offerings would drive business value, increase efficiency, reduce manual labor, and play a significant role in our journey to become a Digital Customer Leader in the Insurance space.

The Team spent 6 months doing market research and comparative analysis, evaluating different software companies that provided data capture capabilities. In July of 2019, the team brought their top four vendors in for a bake-off and put the tools in head-to-head competition with the same use case, tasking the software companies with achieving the highest extraction rates possible. Ultimately, the Team selected AntWorks and their fractal AI tool, ANTstein Square as the Global Capture standard.

They hit the ground running in October designing their STP architecture, standing up cloud infrastructure, and installing the software. They spent 2020 delivering their first 8 automations into production and are already achieving 85% extraction accuracy on all mailed and faxed requests. Many of the documents are hitting accuracy scores north of 93%. These new capabilities have transformed what were formally two or more human touchpoints within a business process into mostly one touch processes. Their Beneficiary Change automation is achieving 91% of all transactions processed with only one human touch point, driving ever closer to our organizations goal of Straight-through Processing.

In addition to their groundbreaking implementations, the Emerging Technologies team achieved the following key accomplishments in 2020:
-Road map to automate the entire data capture opportunity within John Hancock Operations over the next 24-48 months, consisting of over 500 business processes
-Global Capture Playbook that outlines their capability offerings as well as their Capture Governance, Strategy, and Best Practices
-Charge back model for Capture automation delivery and support
-Ability to expand their services to all Segments throughout Manulife

The road to achieving Straight-though Processing hasn’t always been an easy one. The team ran into many challenges that come with being early adopters of new technologies. They learned invaluable skills in software evaluation, global technology procurement, risk, cyber-security, and application architecture. While data capture may not be the silver bullet to end-to-end automation, they succeeded in adding a new capability to their tech stack that compliments the rest of the Global Robotics CoE’s offerings and made great strides in contributing to the company’s strategic priorities. The Emerging Technologies Team are technology evangelists who are committed to proliferating cutting edge solutions that will meet the needs of Manulife’s customers today and tomorrow.