TMHCC

Overview

Tokio Marine HCC's trade credit business insures companies against their customers not paying. Its portal served three people who never sit in the same room: the broker who places the cover, the underwriter who prices it, and the policyholder who needs to know today whether a new customer is covered up to a given limit. The existing portal was slow, not responsive, and made all three do their work by phone and email around it. I led the redesign from proposal through UX to delivery, on Sitecore and BizTalk, with a team of twenty five over eighteen months.

The discovery

The April 2017 digital strategy assessment came first: workshops per line of business, contextual interviews with brokers and underwriters, market research across seventeen leading insurance sites, and a technology assessment of the platform candidates. Trade credit brokers wanted self-service: submit, see status, get documents, without the phone call. Underwriters wanted a single view of the risk, the limits and the buyers. Nine drivers for change were agreed with the leadership team and became the criteria the designs were held to, personalised by role, supported inside the portal, insightful, adaptable to a new territory without a rebuild. The outcome sheet is on this page.

The journey

The broker quote journey was mapped across nine stages and three lanes before a screen was drawn. Grey is what happened by phone and email: clarifications at every stage, the discussion on premium, the wait for a decision. Cyan is what the portal took on: ingesting the broker's documents with OCR and NLP, pulling coverage details from third-party data, holding the underwriter's review and the policy documents in one place, and informing the customer of a decision where they could see it. The map settled which manual steps were worth automating first and which were conversations that should stay conversations.

The design

Role-based dashboards, one per person. The broker's opens on new business, the policy list and renewals, with quotes and expired policies below. The credit limit journey, the core of the product, runs from company search through the application form to confirmation, with a revision path for when a limit needs to change. Buyer details, policy documents and claims submission sit inside the same navigation. Everything is responsive across desktop, tablet and phone, because a policyholder checking a limit is often not at a desk. The style guide was written when wireframing began and kept current through delivery, and the component library it produced, search selects in every state, promotion code behaviour, progress bars for desktop and mobile, notification patterns, is what kept the international portal consistent as territories were added.

How it was made

Stakeholder workshops to align objectives, personas and journey mapping for broker, underwriter and policyholder, hi-fidelity wireframes, and usability testing on the prototypes to validate navigation and workflow before build. WCAG 2.0 AA and GDPR-compliant data handling were release gates. Functional requirements were written so developers could estimate honestly, with UAT and QA gates before each release.

Results

A modern portal with intuitive navigation and role-specific access, positive feedback from the people who used it, streamlined credit limit and policy management workflows, and a scalable foundation for TMHCC's expansion into new territories. The eight hi-fidelity wireframes on this page are from the delivered design; the journey, research sheet, component library and style guide are the material behind them.