Challenge: This mainstay in the insurance industry has their vast accounts payable team manually processing up to 20,000 monthly invoices across three payment channels, a cumbersome manual workflow averaging 15 minutes per item with no automated validation or audit trail.
Solution: Qurrent agentic workforce that owns invoice processing end to end, from email intake and classification through validation, exception handling, and Workday submission, with duplicate detection and a SOX-compliant audit trail.
Results:
90% reduction in invoice processing time
Manual workflow reduced from 20+ steps to 3
350% increase in payment requests handled
The challenge
Vendor invoices arrived at the company through two email inboxes across three channels: Regular, EIB Batch, and Adhoc payment requests. Each one required the same manual sequence. Pull the request, review it, enter the data into Excel, correct errors from an OCR tool that read receipts inaccurately, split batch files containing dozens of invoices, then rekey every field into Workday by hand and route it for approval.
The full workflow had nearly two dozen steps taking anywhere from 10 to 20 minutes to complete. Exceptions, from duplicate checks to cost center coding requests to supplier lookups, each required individual human intervention. The OCR tool alone cost $100K+ a year and created as much correction work as it saved.
The volume was manageable only in the sense that the team kept up. It left no room to absorb growth, and it consumed skilled people on repetitive data entry.
Why this insurance organization expanded its digital workforce into finance
The organization already had agents working in other aspects of the organization but this was the first time they’d turned their sights on finance. Their finance leadership has goals for a multi-year automation program, expanding to other functions within the finance department.. The mandate to automate was settled. The open question was how.
They were weighing an in-house build and platform licensing, both paths that would demand skills, infrastructure, and maintenance the team would have to acquire first. The deciding factor was realizing Qurrent's model meant paying for the result itself.
The solution
Agents now monitor both payment request inboxes around the clock. For each incoming invoice, it classifies the request, validates the data, detects duplicates, enters it into Workday, and routes it for approval, logging every action along the way for a SOX-compliant audit trail.
When the digital worker encounters something it cannot resolve, a missing field, a duplicate, an unfamiliar exception, it sends a summary to a dedicated exceptions inbox explaining exactly what needs a human decision. The AP team no longer monitors the live inboxes at all. Their workflow is now three steps: review the exception, tell the digital worker how to handle it, and approve the request.
That feedback loop is also how the system improves. Each resolved exception becomes new logic, so the share of invoices processed without any human involvement climbs week over week.
The result
Within the first few weeks after its launch, agents processed over a thousand payments, nearly 5X what it had handled during its first week. Meanwhile, average processing time is more than 10X faster than the manual baseline, from a dozen or more minutes to just seconds.
Invoices that arrive over the weekend are done by Monday morning, because the digital workforce runs continuously.
The company is also retiring its OCR software entirely, removing $100K+ in annual cost, since intake and data extraction are now handled natively.
These are week-two numbers. As the digital workforce absorbs more exception types, the automation rate and volume will keep climbing, and we'll update this story with quarter-one results.
What's next
Accounts payable is one workflow inside their broader finance automation program. With lead management and AP both in production, the roadmap points toward operationalizing across the core finance operation towers of Order to Cash, Procure to Pay, Record to Report, FP&A.
About
This company is a large insurance provider serving millions of policyholders across a multi-state region in the United States. Its lines of business span personal insurance products alongside a portfolio of consumer services, with a back-office team managing high volumes of policy inquiries, sales leads, vendor invoices, and financial workflows across legacy systems.
