Star Union Dai-ichi Life Insurance: When a Claim Becomes More Than a Transaction

There are few moments when an insurance company matters more to a customer than when a claim is made. Often, the person seeking settlement is dealing with bereavement, financial uncertainty and an unfamiliar process. For Star Union Dai-ichi Life Insurance (SUD Life), transforming claims management meant more than making a back-office operation efficient. It meant making insurance work better when it was needed the most.

That philosophy underpins DigiClaims, an end-to-end digital claims management platform for death and health claims. It brings claim intimation, registration, assessment, communication, payment processing and analysis into a unified digital workflow.

Making Speed a Promise

The most ambitious expression of the new model is Express Claims, designed to complete end-to-end processing through a single digital workflow within 24-hours, except when verification is required. Eligibility checks, document validation, workflow routing and decision triggers are automated. Standard cases require minimal manual intervention, while alerts, escalations and settlement initiation are built into the system.

The results are striking. Express Claims rose from 37% in FY2024-25 to 45% in FY2025-26, with an average turnaround time of 17 hours and an overall claims turnaround of 3.47 days. The claim settlement ratio also improved, reaching 99.20% after successive gains from 96.15% to 98.66% and 99.07%.

Automation has strengthened scrutiny, not just accelerated payouts. The negative hit ratio in pre-claim checks increased from 7% to 10%. Reported cost savings more than doubled, from ₹4.65 crore to ₹10.08 crore and repudiations declined. Employees, repetitive work and rework have decreased; responsibilities have become clearer and dashboards provide better visibility into bottlenecks. For the organisation, standardised workflows and digital audit trails strengthen compliance and governance. DigiClaims is designed to handle increasing volumes without requiring resources to rise proportionately.

Perhaps the most revealing number is not financial. Personalised customer testimonials increased from 14 in FY2024-25 to 69 in FY2025-26.

Technology typically signals success through speed, productivity and savings. DigiClaims delivers those. But its larger achievement may be quieter: using automation to make a difficult human moment simpler, more transparent and reassuring.