Fortis Insurance Group

The Problem#

• Fortis receives approximately 200,000 life insurance death claims per year across 40 jurisdictions
• Each claim requires verification that the claimant is entitled to proceeds — depending on whether the policy was written in trust, whether the nominated beneficiary is still valid, and whether forced heirship rules override the nomination
• Claims handlers manually request estate documentation from solicitors, wait weeks for responses, and re-key data from scanned PDFs
• Fraudulent claims — where a claimant misrepresents their relationship to the deceased — account for an estimated 1.8% of claims by value
• Forced heirship rules in France, Japan, and Islamic jurisdictions can override policy nominations, but this is currently checked manually

How They’d Use INHERIT#

• Model each life insurance policy using insurance-policy.json with policyType: "life", linked to Fortis via organisation.json with organisationType: "insurance_provider"
• Capture beneficiary designations in nonprobate-transfer.json with transferType: "life_insurance_nomination" and passesOutsideEstate: true for policies that bypass probate
• For EU jurisdictions, use the eu-succession extension’s BrusselsIVChoiceOfLaw type to determine which country’s succession law governs
• For Japan, apply the japan extension’s IryubunClaim[] to model reserved-share claims where reservedFraction may override the policy nomination
• Use common/provenance.json to trace the origin of each claim document — source, capturedAt, and capturedBy create an audit trail
• Record AI-assisted document processing via common/ai-provenance.json with model, confidence score, and human review status

The Integration#

• Bidirectional via API: Fortis exposes an endpoint accepting INHERIT documents alongside claim forms from solicitors and estate administrators
• Internally, INHERIT data maps to underwriting and fraud detection pipelines
• Fortis returns INHERIT-formatted policy data to estate administrators, enabling solicitors to import policy details directly into their case management systems

The Business Case#

• Average claim processing time drops from 42 days to 18 days across 200,000 claims
• Earlier payouts release approximately £180 million per year (at an average claim value of £85,000)
• Automated beneficiary verification using kinship.json and nonprobate-transfer.json reduces fraudulent payouts by an estimated 0.4 percentage points — worth approximately £14 million annually on a £3.4 billion claims book

Before / After#

Without INHERIT:

1. Family member contacts Fortis to report a death and submits a claim form
2. Claims handler requests estate documentation from the solicitor — death certificate, grant of probate, proof of relationship
3. Solicitor sends scanned PDFs; handler re-keys deceased details, policy number, and claimant information
4. Handler manually checks whether forced heirship rules in the relevant jurisdiction override the policy nomination
5. Fraud team reviews the claim against known patterns — limited by unstructured data
6. Claim settles after an average of 42 days

With INHERIT:

1. Solicitor submits an INHERIT document alongside the claim, containing person.json, kinship.json, and nonprobate-transfer.json
2. Fortis system auto-matches the policy via insurance-policy.json fields and verifies claimant entitlement against structured kinship data
3. Forced heirship checks run automatically using jurisdiction-specific extensions
4. Claim settles after an average of 18 days