How APIs and events cut days from marine survey assignment and reporting.
Marine cargo claims live and die on timely, high‑quality surveys. But assignment often stalls in email threads, vendor capacity is opaque, and report completeness varies by port and partner. The cost shows up as prolonged storage and rental fees, weaker negotiating leverage, and frustrated brokers who can’t see progress. You don’t need a new core system to fix this. You need vendor orchestration: secure APIs to request work, an event backbone that coordinates assignment and status, and evidence‑linked document intelligence that speeds review—designed specifically for marine.
Start at FNOL and flow forward. The moment a claim is created, capture the details that determine survey routing—cargo type, declared value, port, damage description, time constraints—and attach the right artifacts (bill of lading, packing list, photos, temperature logs). Index every document down to page/table so reviewers and vendors can click directly to context. From that intake, publish a survey.requested event with the essentials; a capacity‑aware router assigns a surveyor by geography and specialization within minutes, not days. Trust is earned through transparency.
Render the same lifecycle events to a broker/policyholder portal as a simple timeline—“survey requested,” “inspection scheduled,” “report received”—and provide guided document requests when something’s missing. This deflects “where’s my survey?” calls and accelerates completion.
Customer research consistently links digital transparency to higher satisfaction; see recent findings that digital claims experiences lift satisfaction even when external factors slow progress: J.D. Power Digital Claims. Evidence shortens arguments. When extraction pre‑fills a field like “Port of loading: Shanghai,” reviewers must be able to click to the exact bill‑of‑lading line. This “evidence‑linked” pattern turns re‑keying into accept/correct and builds an audit spine that strengthens subrogation and dispute resolution. Standards help reduce mapping churn with partners and TPAs; align payloads to ACORD elements to keep integrations durable as products evolve: ACORD Data Standards.
Turn architecture into flow with three building blocks: a secure API gateway, an event backbone, and explicit queues with SLAs. The API gateway is the front door that brokers, TPAs, and internal tools use to request or report survey work. It enforces identity, consent, rate limits, schema versioning, and field‑level encryption for PII. Start with a minimal set of high‑leverage endpoints: create survey request (bound to a claim), upload evidence (with large‑file support and page‑level indexing), and submit survey report. For partners that lack direct integration, expose a simple portal that calls the same APIs so you don’t fork workflows.
Events broadcast lifecycle facts—survey.requested, inspection.scheduled, report.received, settlement.supporting.docs.completed—so specialized services react without overloading the claims core. A capacity service subscribes to survey.requested to route the job to the right vendor by geography and specialization; a communications service subscribes to send proactive updates; and a quality service subscribes to enforce completeness checks (e.g., photo count/quality, mandatory measurements). Queues make surge visible and manageable. Separate ingress (incoming survey requests) from assignment, field work, and report QA. Each queue owns its SLA and backlog transparency so leaders can direct capacity to the bottleneck of the day.
Observability is non‑negotiable: track age of oldest item, P75/P95 latency, and exception rate by port/region so you can re‑balance quickly when volumes spike. Standards and references reduce rework. Align API payloads to ACORD data elements where practical to minimize partner mapping churn: ACORD Data Standards. For an accessible primer on application events in claims platforms, see: Guidewire App Events. Macro outlooks continue to favor staged modernization (APIs + events) over risky rip‑and‑replace; for context, see Deloitte Insurance Outlook.
Put the plan to work in one quarter and prove impact with metrics brokers care about. Days 1–30: Publish read APIs (claim, policy) and write APIs for survey.requested and evidence upload behind a secure gateway. Bootstrap an event stream with survey.requested, inspection.scheduled, and report.received. Stand up a minimal vendor portal that speaks the same APIs.
Baseline survey assignment latency and report turnaround by port. Days 31–60: Add capacity‑aware routing and vendor scorecards (on‑time % by port, photo quality pass rate, rework rate). Turn on proactive notifications tied to events so brokers/policyholders see status without calling. Enable evidence‑linked extraction for bills of lading and packing lists so reviewers click from a data field to the source snippet. Define SLAs per queue and surface breach alerts. Days 61–90: Introduce a straight‑through lane for low‑complexity, well‑documented cases with clear human overrides. Publish weekly governance reports: decision inputs/outputs with model versions, override reasons, and temporary surge policies (e.g., relaxing noncritical validations for low‑value claims).
Tie improvements to business outcomes: cycle time distribution (median, P75/95), “where’s my survey?” calls deflected, storage/rental days avoided, and broker satisfaction. For legal and market context that helps marine teams align terminology and expectations, keep these references handy: York–Antwerp Rules overview (General Average context) from Marsh: Marsh: YAR 2016. Lloyd’s modernization blueprints emphasize straight‑through processing for simple claims—useful when defining your STP lane: Lloyd’s Blueprint Two. Governance expectations for AI assistance (evidence-linked extraction, triage) are summarized here: NAIC AI Principles and EIOPA AI Governance.