AIA Australia adapts, then adopts Digital iD via DocuSign

Insurer AIA Australia said it has found and delivered “over 300 use cases” for digital identification, using technology from DocuSign.

Senior manager of shared services Matt Morris told DocuSign’s Momentum conference that the insurer had an internal centre of excellence (CoE) set up to drive greater use of the technology and “to empower our people with the right skills to be able to continue this transformation”.

AIA Australia said back in late 2019 that it had started to transform some of its documentation into online forms that could be digitally signed.

Morris said that as part of its efforts, AIA Australia is tapping into Australia Post’s Digital iD service through a formal integration with DocuSign.

The integration offers a mechanism to prove a person’s identity for a document that is digitally signed.

Morris said that AIA Australia had worked with Australia Post and DocuSign to adapt the integration for AIA’s specific needs around maintaining its compliance with anti-money laundering (AML) and know your customer (KYC) rules.

“Prior to DocuSign presenting Digital iD to us, we went out and had a look at this technology ourselves but we had a bit of a hurdle where we were thinking about how we distribute it to our customers,” Morris told the conference.

“We didn’t want to have another app or another website landing, so when DocuSign came to us and said, ‘We’ve integrated [it]’, we were straight away [thinking], ‘Here’s an embedded medium for delivery that we can leverage’. 

“One of the things that we saw in the demo was that it probably just wasnt quite right for us. We’ve got a lot of AML-KYC obligations and that’s going to be key for delivery, so one of the things DocuSign, Australia Post and AIA together worked on was modifying that solution so we were able to get Photo ID as the mandatory document, which enabled the whole thing to play out for our AML requirements.”

Morris said there are now live use cases for Digital iD-DocuSign “in our investments and new business teams”.

“We’re really excited,” he said. 

“Historically, AML checks are a really arduous task for our customers, we [run] a lot of them manually, so it’s really good to see we’ve got this benefit digitally going out.”

Morris said that AIA Australia had “more identification use cases” in the pipeline. 

It is also working on some DocuSign use cases in its claims area, and on a DocuSign CLM [contract lifecycle management] implementation in its legal unit “to really transform our legal workflows.”

Morris added that it is partners like DocuSign that are helping AIA Australia to drive its digital transformation forward.

AIA Australia operates in the health insurance, life insurance, and retirement markets, and has about 3.8 million customers, according to its website.