How Insurers Achieved Sub-One-Hour Claims Settlements in Production

Claims settlements that once took days or weeks are now completing in under one hour at two of Europe's largest claims operations. At Otera's (previously DeepOpinion) Autonomous launch event in April 2025, CED and Allianz Partners shared how they made this operational shift without replacing core systems, expanding teams, or compromising on regulatory compliance.

The results point to something larger than process improvement. These insurers have moved to an entirely different operating model. One where autonomous agents execute claims end-to-end and human experts focus exclusively on the exceptions that demand judgment, empathy, and negotiation.

From Multi-Week Backlogs to Same-Day Resolution

CED, a third-party administrator processing over 600,000 claims per year, deployed Otera's autonomous agents across its claims classification and routing operations. The impact was immediate and structural.

Francois Goffinet, CEO of CED, described the outcome in operational terms:

"We achieved speed. We achieved zero backlog. So everything is done for the next day, and the feedbacks internally and externally have been very good."

Zero backlog across 600,000+ annual claims is not an incremental gain. It represents a fundamentally different way of running claims operations. CED's teams no longer spend their time on classification, triage, or routing. Those decisions now run autonomously. Human expertise is reserved for the cases that genuinely require it.

Goffinet framed the strategic rationale clearly:

"What we are aiming for is the smile of the end customer. That's the ultimate metric we are after."

"We need to remove the administrative burden away from our core resources to make sure we focus them on what really matters and what really creates value for the end customer."

Allianz Partners Runs Autonomous Claims Across Five Countries

Allianz Partners provided a second proof point at global scale. The insurer deployed autonomous claims processing across five countries and multiple lines of business for its travel claims portfolio, all on its existing infrastructure.

Pieter Viljoen, Chief Data Officer of Allianz Partners, explained why claims was the obvious starting point for this shift:

"Claims, if you look at it for insurance, should be the obvious first choice for application of large language models, because it's mostly costly."

For a global insurer operating under regulatory scrutiny across multiple jurisdictions, the most significant value was not speed alone. Viljoen pointed to the consistency and governance that autonomous operations deliver at scale:

"It's about some consistency, some accuracy and some quality of this decision-making, as well as clearly significantly lifting the work of operations."

This is the operational reality that matters at the executive level. When claims decisions run autonomously under governed rules, the insurer gets consistent outcomes across every market, every adjuster equivalent, every claim type. Variance drops. Compliance exposure shrinks. And the operations team is freed to focus on complex, high-value exceptions rather than processing volume.

Autonomous Operations in Practice, Not Theory

What distinguishes these deployments from conventional automation is the scope of what the agents handle. In a live demonstration at the event, a simulated travel insurance claim moved from initial submission through validation, completeness checks, policy verification, and final settlement without human intervention.

The agents did not assist a human operator. They executed the full process, handling unstructured inputs like emails, scanned documents, and photographs, running policy logic, and reaching a settlement decision autonomously.

This is operationally different from workflow tools or robotic process automation, which digitize individual steps but still require humans to bridge systems, reconcile data, and make judgment calls at every transition point. In the autonomous model, agents handle the end-to-end process. Humans set the governance rules and intervene only on true exceptions.

A New Standard, Not a Future Promise

The shift CED and Allianz Partners represent is not theoretical. These are production deployments processing real claims at enterprise scale. And the pattern they demonstrate, same-day resolution, zero backlogs, consistent decision quality across geographies, is becoming the baseline expectation for claims operations that intend to remain competitive.

The question for insurers is no longer whether autonomous claims processing works. The evidence is running in production. The question is how quickly the rest of the industry will follow the operating model that CED and Allianz Partners have already adopted.

See How Leading Insurers Achieve Sub-One-Hour Claims

Want to understand how CED and Allianz Partners made this shift, reach out to book a demo.

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About Otera

Otera brings autonomy to the operations the world depends on. We transform mission-critical processes into governed AI systems that decide and act end-to-end, freeing enterprises to grow without limits. Trusted by Allianz, Siemens, Bayer, SAAB, and Hannover Re.