A growing Bermuda-based life reinsurer was winning new business - but their onboarding process couldn’t keep pace. Every new treaty required a sequence of manual steps: data intake from the cedent, actuarial model configuration, pricing validation, legal documentation review, and accounting setup. Each step was handled by a different team, using different systems, with manual handoffs between them.
The process took around four weeks from signed treaty to operational readiness. During that time, senior people across multiple departments were pulled into coordination work - chasing files, reformatting data, and manually checking that nothing had been missed. The delays lived in the handoffs between teams - the email chains, the “can you send me that file again” moments that consumed days.
For a firm looking to grow fast, this timeline was a strategic constraint. Every month spent onboarding was a month of delayed revenue.
What we did
We started by mapping the actual onboarding workflow. We sat with each team and traced how data moved from the moment a treaty was signed through to the first operational cycle.
What we found was the same data being entered into multiple systems independently, with no single view of onboarding status. There was no automated validation to catch errors before they cascaded downstream.
We designed structured data flows between the existing systems - rather than replacing anything, we connected them. Treaty data entered once at intake was automatically validated, formatted, and routed to each downstream team in the structure they needed. We built automated validation checkpoints that caught inconsistencies before they reached the next stage, and a single status dashboard that showed exactly where each onboarding stood.
Why it matters
In a market where speed to operational readiness directly affects revenue capture, onboarding time is a competitive lever. Firms that can go from signed treaty to live operations in days rather than weeks can pursue opportunities that slower competitors can’t. And they do it without burning out their most experienced people on coordination work.