EXL Payment Assist

Overview

Property & Casualty insurers lose billions annually due to weaknesses in claims vendor payment workflows. 7–14% of total P&C claims spend is overpaid, translating to $45–90B in annual leakage in the US market, with ~25% of this leakage driven by vendor payments. The root cause is a highly manual, fragmented, and control‑weak payment process.

Today’s process relies heavily on adjusters and processors manually validating vendor estimates and invoices. Requests arrive in non‑standard formats (emails, scanned documents, free text), with ~25% of invoices incomplete or unstructured, slowing intake and increasing risk of error. Adjusters spend 30–40% of their time reviewing vendor estimates without consistent internal or external benchmarks, leading to overstated loss estimates being approved.

Critical financial controls are inconsistently applied. Three‑way matching across assignment, estimate, and invoice is frequently missed; contracted rates and discounts are not systematically enforced; and duplicate payments and manipulated invoices often go undetected until after payment. Vendor onboarding, contract validation, coverage checks (including ALE limits), and duplicate detection are largely manual—making the process especially fragile during CAT events, when volume spikes overwhelm already stretched teams.

Payments move through manual approvals, hand‑offs, and claim system updates, resulting in long cycle times, inconsistent documentation, weak audit trails, and limited straight‑through processing. Post‑payment audits remain the primary safeguard, meaning leakage is detected after money has already gone out, creating recovery challenges, financial risk, and operational friction.

In summary, insurers face a systemic problem of high leakage, low control quality, heavy adjuster workload, slow payment cycles, and poor scalability in vendor payments.

Key Features & Functionality

Agentic AI‑led claims vendor payment integrity embeds strong pre‑payment controls directly into the claims payment workflow to prevent leakage before money is released. Its key features and functionality include:

• Intelligent intake & extraction: Auto‑ingests invoices, estimates, emails, and attachments across channels and converts unstructured data into usable formats.
• Fraud detection: Detects manipulated, altered, or forged documents and images, including high‑risk ALE expenses.
• Loss estimate validation: Benchmarks vendor estimates against historical data and external standards to prevent over‑statement before payment.
• Contract & rate enforcement: Validates individual invoice line items against contracted rates, discounts, and pricing rules.
• Duplicate payment detection: Identifies duplicate invoices or repeated line items using historical payment data.
• Risk‑based orchestration: Enables straight‑through processing for clean payments, routing only exceptions for review.
• Integrated communication & updates: Notifies vendors and updates claims and payment systems in real time.
• Human‑in‑the‑loop review: Human reviewer receives exception packages with evidence and insights in case of anomalies which can be referred for faster, higher‑value decisions.
• Built‑in governance & auditability: Explainable decisions, authority limits, immutable audit trails, and MRM controls.
• Modular, technology‑agnostic design: Deployable as individual agents or end‑to‑end, integrating seamlessly with existing claims, payment, and workflow systems.

Benefits & Business Impact

The solution delivers measurable financial, operational, and control benefits by embedding AI‑driven pre‑payment controls into claims vendor payments—preventing leakage before funds are released.

Financial impact

• 2–3% reduction in vendor payments by eliminating overbilling, duplicates, contract violations, and fraud pre‑payment.
• 6–8% reduction in property repair costs through early loss‑estimate benchmarking.

Operational efficiency

• 50–60% productivity improvement by removing manual invoice review and rework.
• 70–75% straight‑through processing for clean invoices.

Control & risk reduction

• 100% pre‑payment audit coverage across vendor invoices.
• Automated enforcement of three‑way matching, contract rates, discounts, and policy limits.
• Early detection of fraud, manipulation, and estimate inflation—critical during CAT events.

Net business outcome

• Insurers pay faster while paying right, reduce leakage at source, strengthen financial controls, and scale operations without adding headcount—delivering sustained, outcome‑aligned value.