Emtech Group Podcast
Episode #7: Streamlining XML Data Validation in Insurance
Summary
In this episode, the speakers discuss the introduction of new software, QMT TrueXML, aimed at automating and enhancing XML data validation for the insurance industry. The conversation highlights common issues carriers and Insurtechs face with incomplete or inaccurate transaction data, which often prolong the QA process. QMT TrueXML automates the validation of XML data by checking for completeness and accuracy, eliminating the need for manual processes and helping ensure high-quality data exchange between systems. This leads to faster results and improves the accuracy of underwriting decisions.
The automation provided by QMT TrueXML also addresses the challenge of high “not in good order” (NIGO) rates, where incomplete or inaccurate data causes delays. Users can configure validation settings and access detailed reports, enabling them to detect and resolve errors early in the process. By improving the accuracy of data and speeding up the time to market for new products, QMT TrueXML is poised to reduce reputational risk, improve margins, and enhance satisfaction for both customers and distributors in the insurance industry.
To find more episodes of Emtech Group Podcasts, visit our resource center. To read more about Quality Assurance, QMT, QMT TrueXML, and technology topics, visit our blog.
To find the transcription of this podcast, scroll to the bottom of the page.
The views and opinions expressed in the podcast are those of the guests and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Emtech Group Inc.
Featuring
Rob Secontine
Rob is an experienced executive with a proven track record of driving successful startups and turnarounds in the software and hardware industries, leading to multiple company exits. He specializes in building high-performing sales teams, particularly for early-stage and growth-phase companies, and developing strategies for strong ARR and MRR growth. Rob has extensive experience working with investors and boards and is passionate about mentoring sales teams and creating effective sales processes for new products and markets.
Sashia Godet
Sashia Godet is an accomplished product professional with extensive expertise in product lifecycle management and development strategies. She holds a BA in Economics from the University of Waterloo and an MFIN degree from Queen’s University, combining strong analytical skills with strategic insight. Known for her ability to optimize product lifecycles from inception to market launch, Sashia excels at leveraging consumer behavior insights and market trends to drive successful product strategies throughout her career.
Transcript
00:00:17 Rob Secontine
Hello, Sasha. Good to talk with you again. It’s certainly an exciting time for us here at M tech group with the launch of QMT True XML and we’ll chat a bit about that today because it’s exciting.
00:00:30 Rob Secontine
And one of the things that struck me when we were thinking about putting this together is that while the greatest challenges that carriers and Insurtech alike encounter while pursuing on time, high quality product launches is that the transaction data files used between systems are often.
00:00:50 Rob Secontine
Either incomplete or inaccurate, and this considerably lengthens the QA cycle because existing manual observation approaches to validate the.
00:01:01 Rob Secontine
Data are just not scalable, and I guess I’d like to understand a bit more from your side as to what really led M tech to develop QMT through XML.
00:01:14 Sashia Godet
Great question, Rob, and nice chatting with you again came out of the very idea that you mentioned. There is a problem that insurance carriers and insured tax alike are facing. Data quality is a big issue in that space.
00:01:29 Sashia Godet
And specifically in XML. So XML is a standard format that industry uses for transmitting data between systems, particularly or more popularly is the transmission of data between the app and underwriting. And that data transmission and the quality of that data is very important to.
00:01:51 Sashia Godet
Carriers, because it is the input to their underwriting process.
00:01:56 Sashia Godet
And having that information be accurate is important in ensuring that the underwriting process can complete, and it’s not thrown back to the applicant and that the decision that is made is accurate, including the premiums or whether to give out a policy or not. So.
00:02:16 Sashia Godet
Because of those problems, hearing it from customers and prospects alike, we realize that there is a burning need to address the data quality between transmission of data between systems, and so that is what’s that’s what really birth the idea of QMT through XML. It is addressing that pain point that.
00:02:36 Sashia Godet
Areas and Insurtech are facing today.
00:02:39 Rob Secontine
That certainly is important, but the way carriers and Insurtech try to address this today is mostly through manual or scripted processes, which are often incomplete and cumbersome. How does true XML automate the data validation?
00:02:56 Sashia Godet
Great question. So, you’re right today they are doing highly manual processes sometimes referred to as a light bulb test or you just do a very quick spot check what QMP Trex XML does that is.
00:03:12 Sashia Godet
A lot different is that it automates that process. It integrates it with the existing QMT framework, and by doing that it allows the users to.
00:03:23 Sashia Godet
Configure what they want to validate in their XML and for every test case that they execute through QMT, it will find the corresponding XML for that test case, and it will execute and validate based on the configuration that the user has set up so.
00:03:41 Sashia Godet
The effort in testing is in the configuration, which you can consider as your requirements, but everything after that in terms of the execution, figuring out whether the XML is complete, accurate or not, getting the results of that execution, that’s all automated by QMT and it ties in very closely with the test.
00:04:01 Sashia Godet
Pieces that QTS main product offers as well.
00:04:07 Rob Secontine
That’s interesting. So, it is a complementary product to QMT.
00:04:12 Sashia Godet
It is, yes.
00:04:14 Rob Secontine
Excellent. Now when we think about the validation of the data, I guess what we’re trying to do and you can correct me if I’m wrong, is really validate the data for completeness as well as accuracy. Can you go into that a little bit more?
00:04:29 Sashia Godet
Sure. You’re spot on with that. So, we do check for completeness and accuracy. Both are equally important.
00:04:37 Sashia Godet
With completeness, we’re checking for the presence of required attributes that the user stipulates in their configuration that they want to check for. That ensures that the XML tag is present and within that XML tag if value is also present. In addition to that, we also check for the accuracy of the data.
00:04:57 Sashia Godet
Once it is present, so if your policy you expect to have Kevin Williams as the policyholder.
00:05:05 Sashia Godet
We will check for that value in your XML in a particular tag that it has Kevin Williams if it has anything other than Kevin Williams that’s considered to be inaccurate. And in that case, we will raise an exception for you and give you side by side comparison of the expected value versus the actual value that we were able to find in the XML for that particular test.
00:05:26 Sashia Godet
Please.
00:05:27 Rob Secontine
So, the user will actually.
00:05:29 Rob Secontine
See the error and be able to identify it early in the process. Is that right?
00:05:35 Sashia Godet
Absolutely.
00:05:36 Rob Secontine
And I’m going to guess. So, here’s another problem that I was thinking about. But what about if the TrueXML information is changing or you know, are we just looking at a happy path for example? Or does TrueXML go beyond?
00:05:53 Sashia Godet
It goes beyond that and it’s really driven by what the user wants to cover and so that’s the neat thing about it being integrated with QMT TQT. The core product will generate your test cases and that is based on your business process. So, when you model your business process, if you’ve included negative scenarios that you want to test.
00:06:14 Sashia Godet
You will get test cases for negative and positive scenarios and then you can an extension of that you can set up your XML configuration for those test cases and So what that means is that you can validate XMLS for positive use cases and negative use cases.
00:06:32 Sashia Godet
It’s very flexible. It depends on whatever the user wants to validate the options are there for them to do that.
00:06:39 Rob Secontine
So, at the end of the day, we’re going to provide the user with I I’m assuming easy to understand reports that have detailed results, correct?
00:06:49 Sashia Godet
That is correct, so users won’t be able to.
00:06:51 Rob Secontine
And what are the benefits of that?
00:06:53 Sashia Godet
They can pinpoint their issues more quickly and with doing that they can resolve them quickly and then rerun the test if they need to and do that as many times as it gets them to a full proof X HML for ingestion into underwriting.
00:07:09 Rob Secontine
This has to improve margin at the end of the day and distributor satisfaction, but it also has to reduce reputational risk, I’m sure.
00:07:17 Rob Secontine
Sure. So, is this a codeless or coded verification process?
00:07:23 Sashia Godet
It is cordless, so the user they are not updating the scripts. They are not updating test cases. They’re simply coming and setting up their configuration of what they want to validate what elements so they will identify to us the XML elements and.
00:07:40 Sashia Godet
Any formatting that they want to apply to the value to ensure that the expected value and the target value match, but it’s only configurations, there’s no need to set up any scripts or anything of that nature to get the XML validation going.
00:07:56 Rob Secontine
Then that’s got to really add to the automation of the process and really eliminates the time spent on manual development and maintenance. And this can only.
00:08:06 Rob Secontine
Grease QA throughput and reduce you know cycle time to drive more business on the books and do it sooner. This is a tremendous product. It sounds like and can you give me some feel for the ease of use and who can use this product?
00:08:21 Sashia Godet
Yeah, absolutely. So, we’ll start in the QA space. Anyone that’s currently in the QA space as deck members, QA personnel, they obviously are users because they’re currently in that space and they know how it works.
00:08:34 Sashia Godet
But the neat thing about QMT is that it doesn’t only cater to technical persons in the QA space, it can also be used by business analysts who are close to the product, but not necessarily overly technical. Our product is set up such that they are can be users of that product. You can also have persons in product.
00:08:54 Sashia Godet
Management that again are close to the requirements, because that’s really what you’re setting up in QMT. They can use it as well. So, it is a product that can be used by highly technical.
00:09:04 Sashia Godet
People and not so technical people as well.
00:09:07 Rob Secontine
That’s interesting and it obviously changes the landscape of QA. I would think in not only the carrier space, but in the technical solution provider side of the conversation as well. When we think about simplifying change management and how it applies to this specific application of change management within the XML data configuration.
00:09:28 Rob Secontine
Can you go into a little more detail on that and does that apply to a particular accord transaction?
00:09:33 Sashia Godet
Right. So change management is quite straight.
00:09:36 Sashia Godet
Board. As mentioned, we are not. The user is not going into scripts or test cases. They are simply maintaining the configurations that they want to use as part of the validation process. So, where there is a change to the location of a particular element, they will come to their configuration and update it there.
00:09:57 Sashia Godet
If there is a change to the format of a.
00:10:00 Sashia Godet
Regular element they can come to their configuration and make the change there or if expected value changes from 1:00 to another, they can come to their configuration and make it there. So it’s all in one central location. It’s not highly technical. The nature of changes that they will need to make, and it takes them a couple of seconds or up to a minute depending on how many changes that they’re make.
00:10:20 Sashia Godet
King, so it is all user friendly through an interface and in terms of where we started, our focus for XML validation we have focused for the time being on the XML’s that are used to transmit data between the app and underwriting. So most referred to as the chord one or three.
00:10:41 Sashia Godet
That’s where we’ve decided to start the validation process, but that will be expanded upon in the future.
00:10:46 Rob Secontine
Sasha getting back to some of the reasons that Q, Mt True XML was developed, I think about especially carriers referring to us about experiencing increases in nygo rates and really trying to reduce that reputational risk that is associated with not a rate. Can you take a second?
00:11:06 Rob Secontine
And tell us a bit on how QMT TrueXML will help carriers reduce their nygo rates.
00:11:13 Sashia Godet
When I think of Nigro, it’s the key issues contributing to that is incomplete or inaccurate data for underwriting to use in their decision-making process. And those are the two things that Kim Teacher XML focuses on in their validation process. So, think about it. Nigo rates not in good order.
00:11:34 Sashia Godet
Means how many?
00:11:35 Sashia Godet
Applications am I getting in that I can’t properly make a decision on either because I don’t have the required information so required fields are missing or because I have inaccurate information, and I can’t make a decision based on that either. So, with QMT through XML we are checking that required fields are present, we’re checking that.
00:11:55 Sashia Godet
The required fields, once present, are accurate based on the expected value inputted by the.
00:12:01 Sashia Godet
User and with those two areas being covered, you’re going to ensure that what the underwriter is looking at is complete, it’s accurate and if that is happening on every application that they’re receiving, then they’re Nigro rates are gonna go down because they can make an accurate decision and either issue a policy or choose not to with the correct information.
00:12:21 Sashia Godet
Yeah.
00:12:22 Rob Secontine
That makes a ton of sense, but if you also think about it, getting a product out to market and getting to the point where you reduce the nail.
00:12:29 Rob Secontine
Rates for applications etcetera is even or maybe more critical to the situation. I’ve heard time and again from distribution folks at carriers as well as marketing and product folks from carriers that it just takes so long to get a new product to market. How can QMT trucks ML assist a carrier?
00:12:49 Rob Secontine
With that as well.
00:12:51 Sashia Godet
First off, it changes testing in this space from manual.
00:12:55 Sashia Godet
Which anything that’s manual will take time to automate it. So, the very fact that it’s shifting the nature of testing from something that’s manual and not fulsome in terms of his coverage to something that’s automated and with better coverage, you immediately speed up your testing cycle and that means you’re identifying your defects.
00:13:15 Sashia Godet
Earlier you’re resolving them earlier and not only are you going to market sooner, you’re going to market with a product that has been.
00:13:22 Sashia Godet
Tested and the defects largely resolved.
00:13:25 Rob Secontine
Wow, I can really see why you mentioned that this product is truly a game changer because it not only substantially reduces the reputational risk from errors, but it brings the product to market so much quicker.
00:13:38 Rob Secontine
Obviously, if we can do that, think about the amount of margin that can be developed from bringing a product to market 345 months sooner than originally thought in a business plan.
00:13:50 Sashia Godet
Absolutely. And that’s why QMT chum X true XML is indeed a game changer.
00:13:56 Rob Secontine
That’s great to know. And Sasha, is there anything else that you’d like to comment on with respect to QMT true XML that I’ve may have forgotten about?
00:14:04 Sashia Godet
Other than saying it is a game changer, it will expedite the testing of a currently very manual space and with that carriers and insure techs and customers of these carriers.
00:14:17 Sashia Godet
Will have increased confidence that the policies that they’re getting, the decisions that are being made from the data that’s being passed between these systems are accurate and complete. And I think that will lead to.
00:14:30 Sashia Godet
Increased reputational image in the industry and more margin, more higher margins and more revenue.
00:14:37 Rob Secontine
That’s terrific, Sasha, and thank you very much for taking the time to chat with me today. If people would like to learn a bit more about QMT true XML, they can certainly go to our website mtechgroup.com or check us out on other podcasts as well. Thanks again, Sasha.
00:14:55 Sashia Godet
Thanks, rob. Great chatting with you again.