How insurance giant Fonds Finanz saves 10,000 hours a year with automation

In the high-stakes world of insurance, innovation doesn’t usually happen overnight and inefficiencies are commonplace.

But Jonathan Posselt has helped turn Germany’s leading insurance broker pool into a modern, digital operation with a thirst for automation and integration.

With a history dating back to 1996, Fonds Finanz has grown partly thanks to a series of acquisitions and embracing digital systems. While that has helped the company become a leading player, it also means it has grappled with bottlenecks like disconnected CRM systems and manual, labor-intensive processes.

Posselt set out to change all that. Working initially in the marketing department, he found himself increasingly drawn to solving broader company inefficiencies through automation using the Make platform, and has gone on to become the company’s artificial intelligence team leader.

Problem solving

1. Synchronizing Facebook leads and CRM

"I was looking for a solution - we were generating leads in Facebook and wanted to get them into our CRM system," says Posselt, recalling how the first idea in 2021 involved calling on developers to hand-code a transfer system.

"We had to develop everything on our own and it was very slow," he adds. "I was searching for a solution where I could make it on my own. I discovered Make and found a way to get this data into our system."

Make’s no-code platform lets people connect apps and build processes visually, meaning professionals like Posselt, who studied acting but became an insurance specialist, don’t have to rely on traditional code development.

For Posselt, a light bulb had turned on - he didn’t stop there: "Then I thought, ‘Okay, I want to extract leads from our WordPress website and want to bring them to our system."

Word spread inside Fonds Finanz that an apprentice automation magician was weaving spells and smashing through business problems.

"Someone from the sales department came to me and said, ‘Hey, you made this automation, can you help us automate new-customer onboarding? So it was growing bigger and bigger."

2. Easing the pain of paper

Soon, Posselt was using Make to bestow super powers outside of his own marketing team, at the heart of the business, including contract assessment and management.

"This is a very manual process," he says. "It was an insurance application form and the employee had to check everything - extract the insurance holder, extract the premium, extract who is insured, his insurance company and so on. Then they had to check everything was right in the contract - how high is the premium, bring the contract into the system and send it to the insurance company."

At one point, a team of office managers on the fifth floor of the company’s Munich HQ was engaged in merely processing insurance applications - a task both time-consuming and prone to human error.

"We used Make to automate this process," Posselt says.

3. Extracting contract data with AI

If Fonds Finanz was discovering the benefit of automation, it would also see the joys of integration.

The company was suffering from using at least four different CRM tools - Salesforce for customer support, two for insurance broker customers and a third, SAP, for payment data.

"The hardest part was to synchronize everything - you have to find workarounds because you don't always get an API. Make helped a lot," Posselt says.

In the insurance contract process, Fonds Finanz has to check all documents for signatures and validate that the client is permitted to contract with the company at all. But the team found a way to make it work better.

"We extract all emails for the insurance application forms from Salesforce and give it to Document AI that extracts all the information out of the contracts," Posselt adds. "Make does all the orchestration."

4. Automating social media marketing

One impactful automation has earned Fonds Finanz industry prestige. An AI-powered social media marketing manager, enabled by Make, received Cash.Online magazine's Innovation Award for the insurance sector.

"This AI was trained on insurance knowledge and writes social media posts for people in the insurance industry," Posselt explains.

"The user only needs to specify who they are, who their target audience is and what products they are selling. Then the social media AI proceeds like a social media manager - it comes up with a list of topics, creates an editorial calendar, writes the posts and generates images for the posts. The intermediary can sit back and let the AI do the work for them.

"Almost all back-end processes are handled by Make. Thus, Make passes the request to our social media AI, which then creates the texts and sends them back and writes them into the database. Even the publication of the post to LinkedIn is controlled via a HTTP request in Make."

The efficiency squad

The organization was so sold on efficiency gains from no-code automation that it charged Posselt with forming a dedicated in-house automation team.

Starting with two staff and growing to four, the team has built its fair share of process-busting breakthroughs for internal clients. But a key goal now is enabling staff across Fonds Finanz to build solutions for themselves.

"We hold a weekly workshop with around 15 employees, discussing ‘What are the biggest manual tasks that we have at the moment, how can we automate that?’," says Jonathan Posselt.

It began by showing staff how to use a large language model (LLM) to read customer e-mail and act accordingly. "We have a dedicated power user in every department. We teach the employees how they can automate it with Make."

Speeding-up big business

For Posselt, now the AI team lead for Fonds Finanz, the automation odyssey has paid off extraordinarily well.

"Last year, Make scenarios saved us 10,000 hours in back-office work versus what had been done manually by the employees," he says.

Today, the company, which in 2023 posted prior-year annual revenue up 13% to €254.3 million, is running 127 Make scenarios across the organization.

The gains are likely to grow further as the company’s own business scales.

But the benefits arguably go beyond Fonds Finanz. The company is signaling that, with some simple tools, even the most traditional of sectors can accelerate digital processes, safeguarding against analog inefficiencies.

For Posselt, that is insurance enough.