Case Study: Funeral Directors Life Insurance achieves rapid automation of new business and claims, saving 20,000 hours with OnBase

Insurer embraces intelligent automation and realizes an 88% return on its Hyland bot investment

Funeral Directors Life Insurance Company (FDLIC), a $1.7B preneed life insurer serving funeral homes, faced growing operational bottlenecks after rapid expansion: disconnected systems and end-of-day “settling” caused lags in its line-of-business application, forced eight staff to work late on more than 2,000 weekly contracts, and limited employees’ ability to engage customers. FDLIC had already adopted OnBase to improve document and workflow management but needed a way to scale new business and claims processing without adding headcount.

During an internal “Hack Week” FDLIC integrated Hyland RPA with OnBase to automate new business and claims workflows. Five bots now settle the bulk of contracts (95% in the first three months), delivering an 88% ROI in one month and eliminating end-of-day processing spikes; claims automation saves about seven minutes and $4.36 per claim (27,000 claims/year) and has removed roughly 20,000 manual hours over two years while supporting $15M+ in increased claims volume. The automation freed staff for higher‑value customer work, enabled easy bot configuration by nondevelopers, and set up plans to expand RPA to agent onboarding and partner software rollouts.

Funeral Directors Life Insurance

Kyle Swearingen

Vice President of Development