Albion Life Claims Team

The Problem#

• Albion Life is a mid-size UK life insurer handling approximately 2,000 death claims per year
• Claims arrive by post — a paper form, a death certificate, and sometimes a copy of the will
• The claims handler must manually extract the policyholder’s details, verify the beneficiary, check whether the policy is written in trust, and determine the correct payout
• For policies where the deceased had multiple life policies across different providers, the executor must submit separate claims to each insurer with the same information re-keyed each time
• The average death claim currently takes 25 working days to process

How They’d Use INHERIT#

• Albion builds an ingestion pipeline accepting INHERIT JSON documents via a secure API endpoint, extracting insurance-policy.json entries where policyNumber matches Albion’s records
• The deathBenefit object provides amount, nomineePersonId, nominationCurrent, and benefitType; the writtenInTrust flag determines whether proceeds bypass the estate
• person.json entries carry the deceased’s dateOfDeath and the beneficiary’s identity for verification
• The policyConditions[] array flags exclusion clauses (suicide, contestability period) with condition, expiryDate, and impact
• document.json with type: "death_certificate" provides the death certificate metadata, and claimStatus tracks the lifecycle from pending through approved to paid

The Integration#

• Executors or solicitors submit an INHERIT document to Albion’s claims API
• The system validates the JSON, matches the policy, verifies the beneficiary against people[], checks exclusion conditions, and initiates the claims workflow
• The response includes the claim reference and expected timeline

The Business Case#

• Structured intake via INHERIT could reduce the average claim from 25 working days to 10–12 days by eliminating manual data extraction
• Claims handlers currently spend approximately 4 hours per claim on data entry and verification — across 2,000 claims, that is 4,000 hours per year of re-keying eliminated
• Faster payouts reduce complaints and regulatory risk under FCA Consumer Duty obligations
• A single INHERIT document submitted once serves multiple insurers, reducing executor burden

Before / After#

Without INHERIT:

1. An executor posts a paper claim form, death certificate, and will extract to Albion Life
2. A claims handler spends 4 hours extracting details, verifying the beneficiary, and checking trust status
3. The handler requests missing information by letter — another 5–7 days lost
4. The executor repeats the entire process for each of the deceased’s other life insurers
5. The claim takes 25 working days; the family waits nearly six weeks for the payout

With INHERIT:

1. The executor’s solicitor submits a single INHERIT document to Albion’s API
2. The system automatically matches the policy, verifies the beneficiary, and checks exclusion conditions
3. The claims handler reviews the pre-populated case — 30 minutes instead of 4 hours
4. The same INHERIT document is submitted to the deceased’s other insurers simultaneously