CCC News & Insights

September 2, 2021

Straight-Through Processing: The Power of Network

Shivani GovilSVP, Chief Product Officer

Today networked businesses are all around us. Let’s take food delivery - in 2020, the top 10 food delivery apps accumulated over 91 million U.S. downloads. These apps make a complex process of ordering dinner remotely from a favorite local restaurant as simple as a few clicks. It’s a great example of straight-through processing creating a seamless customer experience (the process of ordering food) enabled by a vast network of businesses working together behind the scenes: food suppliers, restaurants, payment systems, delivery drivers, etc. Food delivery apps are also a great example of how a dynamic business network has become the foundation to enable innovation and create delightful experiences. Imagine if you had to go offline for any of the steps to get your food delivered – for example, if you had to find the driver to deliver the food to you while ordering from the restaurant separately – it would greatly diminish the experience and limit the adoption of these types of apps. A dynamic network of stakeholders working together across an industry enables seamless experiences for end users that cross business boundaries and stitch everything together so that the objective can be accomplished in a straight-through manner.Some people may wonder how food delivery apps compare with the experience of filing an auto claim, which is a more complex web of hundreds of micro-transactions happening across the business network, from insurers to repairers, parts suppliers, lenders, OEMs, towing and rental providers. At CCC, our plan to deliver on the industry’s vision of straight-through processing for insurance claims is actually quite similar to the food delivery app example above: to create an end-to-end experience across all the different stakeholders and businesses in order to resolve the auto claim incident in a frictionless manner for the end user.We have been working to connect businesses across the industry for years to make the auto claims experience seamless for our clients as well as the end consumer. We started by connecting insurers with their customers in a seamless manner when an adverse event is triggered. We then enable the insurers to connect collision repairers to seamlessly enable the repair process, making it easier for insurers and repairers to manage assignments, monitor compliance, and share information. We further build on that foundation by establishing CCC Parts, an online marketplace that connects collision repairers with parts suppliers—aftermarket, OEM, and recycled—to facilitate finding the best parts most efficiently and reducing returns as well as cycle time. We’ve also connected collision repairers with OEMs to facilitate diagnostics testing and to make OEM repair methods accessible through the CCC ONE® platform. Using our platform, insurers can also coordinate towing services and rental vehicles with participating providers in their business network for drivers after an accident. We’ve also created an online portal to connect insurers and lenders to accelerate total loss resolution, saving weeks of time for both parties and getting customers back on the road much sooner.Most of our solutions operate in the CCC Cloud, making these connections faster and easier to innovate. Today, the CCC Cloud connects a network of more than 30,000 businesses, including more than 300 insurers, 26,000 repair facilities, thousands of parts suppliers, and more. By bringing all of these stakeholders together, we’ve been able to help our clients accelerate claim-to-resolution for thousands of their customers.We continue to bring the network together to streamline more significant parts of the claims experience. Our newly announced product, CCC® Estimate – STP will use a powerful combination of technologies, data, and partner connections enhance digitization in the estimating process. The solution will employ advanced AI, insurer-driven rules, and CCC’s vast network connections to automatically populate predictive, detailed, actionable estimates on qualified repairable claims in moments. The line-level details, from parts, to labor operations and hours, with plans to be able to calculate to taxes for each repair, will populate through our connections with thousands of clients across CCC’s network.Another product we announced this year, CCC® Payments*, extends the connections across the network by enabling digital payments between insurers and their business partners. By integrating CCC Payments into existing workflow solutions, insurance carriers can pay collision repairers and lenders digitally from the systems they use daily, thus accelerating the receipt of the payment. CCC’s extensive network connections across the P&C ecosystem makes it easier for insurers to activate payments at scale. Insurers can also pay businesses outside of the CCC network.We see significant cycle time reductions - up to 33% - when telematics, AI and mobile technology are applied across the claims process, and this acceleration of cycle time will continue to grow as we bring these technologies together to achieve more straight-through experiences for more parts of the claims process. This is a tangible benefit not just for the businesses involved in the process, but for their customer who is eagerly hoping to get back on the road and back to her life as soon as possible.None of this would be possible without the dynamic network of businesses across the P&C insurance economy working together. Straight-through processing and seamless experiences require a digitally connected network and intelligently driven, curated experiences. That’s our commitment at CCC: to deliver the innovations that keep people’s lives moving forward when it matters most.Learn more about CCC’s Network Management solutions.--*CCC Payments transactions initiated by participating insurers will be processed by Nvoicepay, a third-party financial technology company and a leader in payment automation software.