How Halden Mutual settles claims in two days, not nine

The challenge

Halden's claims system was built for a business that settled claims by post. A claim reported on Monday was registered overnight, checked the next night and paid, at best, the following week. By 2022 a straightforward claim took nine days on average to settle. Handlers kept their own spreadsheets to track what the system could not, and the four people who understood its code were all within ten years of retirement.

Replacing it was the obvious answer and the frightening one. The system held 1.2 million policies across four product lines. The last attempt to change it, in 2017, had frozen new products for eight months and was stopped halfway.

The approach

We proposed moving one product line at a time, starting with the smallest. Travel went first: 80,000 policies, simple claims and a season that ends in September. A new claims platform took over travel claims while the old system carried on with everything else. A routing layer in front of both sent each claim to the right place, so customers and brokers saw no change of address, phone number or form.

For six weeks after each move, both systems processed the same claims, and an overnight report compared every payment. Any difference was investigated before the old system's share of that line was switched off. Across the whole program, 23 differences were found. All 23 turned out to be errors in the old system.

“We kept selling, kept paying claims and kept launching products the whole time. That was the condition, and it held.”

Claims handlers were part of the team from the first week. Eight of them spent two days a week with our designers and engineers, deciding how the new screens should work and which old workarounds could go. They then trained their colleagues, one product line at a time.

What the new platform does

• Registers a claim the moment it is reported, online, by phone or through a broker.
• Checks cover and runs fraud rules in seconds, not overnight.
• Pays approved claims straight away, with no batch to wait for.
• Gives handlers one screen for the claim, the policy and every message about it.

The outcome

The last product line, small business, moved in December 2025. The old system was switched off in March 2026, and its records archived where auditors can still reach them. Halden's own platform team, built up alongside ours, now runs and extends the platform. In September 2026 the two firms extended their partnership through 2030.

2 daysAverage time to settle a straightforward claim, down from nine.

41% of travel claims are now paid within 24 hours of being reported. Handlers spend about a third less time on each claim, and that time has gone into the complex claims where a person makes the most difference.