Everyone’s digitising – no one’s fixing the document problem

Rein van der Horst, CEO of DocFusion Document Generation and Automation. (Image: Supplied)

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In July 2024, Discovery Insure confirmed a breach that exposed personal policyholder data. And while the number of affected clients was small, the damage to trust was anything but.

It’s just one example of how document vulnerabilities – whether in access, version control or manual processes – can trigger reputational, financial and compliance fallout. This is the invisible risk inside every insurer’s operation – until it’s too late.

In insurance, every product, policy and process depends on documents. Yet the systems behind them are often the weakest link in the value chain.

From outdated templates and disconnected platforms to manual workarounds and shadow IT, the wrong document generation tools are quietly breaking compliance, slowing operations and eroding customer trust.

Worse still, most insurers don’t recognise it as the real problem. They treat document generation as a back-office task, when in reality, it’s one of their most critical strategic liabilities.

Document generation isn’t back-office admin. It’s frontline infrastructure.

The result? Customer delays. Regulatory exposure. And a business that looks digital on the surface, but is still running on 2005 behind the scenes.

South Africa already ranks among the most expensive countries in the world for data breaches – averaging R50 million per incident. And while not every breach starts with a document issue, many start with document process failures.

Insurers today are often juggling one of three scenarios:

• A homegrown solution that only a few people in IT understand.
• An outdated, legacy document engine duct-taped to a CRM or reporting tool.
• Or – worse – a mix of tools meant for everything except document generation.

These set-ups weren’t built for today’s reality: thousands of templates, personalised per product, customer, channel and underwriter. They weren’t built to handle constant regulatory changes, multi-channel delivery or batch runs of millions of documents.

Yet teams are still trying to make them work. And they’re losing hours, accuracy and opportunities in the process.

Here’s a typical day in the life of a document generation problem:

• A claims analyst spots a compliance issue in a policy schedule.
• The business requests a template change. IT is looped in.
• Two weeks later, the update is made – but the product has already gone live.
• Meanwhile, customers received the wrong terms and conditions.

More than just frustrating, this is a highly risky situation. And for an industry where compliance is non-negotiable and speed matters, it’s unsustainable.

Many insurers still rely on CRM platforms or reporting tools to generate documents – not because they’re ideal, but because they’re already there. It’s a workaround that works… until it doesn’t.

These systems weren’t built to assemble complex, data-driven documents at scale. They can’t easily manage variations across underwriters, channels or regulatory requirements. And they certainly weren’t designed to maintain version control, enforce compliance or scale to millions of outputs.

The result is often a slow, rigid process that places an unnecessary burden on IT and opens the door to errors – especially when templates are being edited in Word or output is manually compiled into PDFs.

Because speed, accuracy and auditability are non-negotiable, insurers need a purpose-built platform – one that’s designed to generate and manage documents at the pace and scale of the industry itself.

Whether it’s a motor insurance quote, a group life welcome pack or a benefit statement for 1.2 million policyholders – modern insurance documents require systems that are:

• Template-centric, not tool-dependent 

Build once, adapt dynamically across products, underwriters and languages. Re-use clauses, terms and conditions and brand assets like logos across multiple templates.

• Business-user friendly

Let your business analysts own the content – without relying on IT for every update.

• Audit-ready

Version control, change tracking and output validation shouldn’t be optional – it should be mandatory.

• Built for batch

Processing thousands of documents per second shouldn’t require a war room.

It’s easy to assume that speed is the end goal – but in the insurance world, scale without structure just amplifies risk.

What insurers really need is document generation that scales with control:

• A centralised template repository that serves as the single source of truth.
• Automated processes with built-in approvals and version tracking.
• Visibility into who changed what, and when.
• Assurance that every document produced is consistent, compliant and customer-ready.

Whether you’re producing one document or one million documents, the standard shouldn’t shift. And it’s that consistency at scale that defines operational maturity in a modern insurance business.

One leading South African insurer recently overhauled its document stack – migrating thousands of templates into a centralised system.

The result?

1. Business analysts – not just developers – can now create, manage and deploy document templates in minutes.
2. Policy schedules, claim notifications, benefit summaries: all dynamically generated, version-controlled and delivered instantly to the customer’s preferred channel.
3. The IT team stopped fielding “please fix my template” requests.
4. Compliance loved the audit trails.
5. Customers got the right documents, faster.

Insurance firms don’t fall apart from one spectacular failure. They fall behind slowly – through small, operational gaps that grow wider over time.

Documents are far more than just paperwork. They’re promises, policies and proofs. And if the system creating them isn’t keeping up, the business behind them won’t either.

It’s time to fix the document problem.

References:

Moneyweb – Discovery Insure confirms data breach

BusinessTech – Cybercrime warning in South Africa

The Record – Landmark, an administrator for insurance firms, says 800 000 affected by data breach