Regure vs Applied Epic: Claims Automation Beyond Agency Management

When insurance professionals search for "Applied Epic claims automation" or "Applied Epic alternative," they are usually asking one of two quite different questions. The first: can Applied Epic do more with claims than I am currently using it for? The second: is there a better option for claims processing specifically, and how does it compare to what Applied Epic provides?

The honest answer to both questions starts with a clear-eyed understanding of what Applied Epic is, what it was designed to do, and where its design choices leave a gap that a dedicated claims automation platform fills. This is not a competitive takedown of Applied Epic — it is a genuinely excellent system for what it does. The point is that what it does is agency management, not claims automation, and conflating the two leads to operational problems that are both avoidable and expensive.

What Applied Epic Is (and Why It Dominates Agency Management)

Applied Epic is the market-leading agency management system (AMS) in commercial insurance, with a presence across independent agencies, brokerages, and MGAs throughout North America and increasingly in international markets. It is built around the core operational needs of an insurance distribution business: managing client relationships, tracking policies, processing renewals, handling commissions and accounting, generating ACORD forms, and managing producer performance.

Within those domains, Applied Epic is genuinely sophisticated. Its policy management capabilities handle complex commercial accounts with multiple coverage lines, endorsements, and mid-term changes. Its accounting module manages premium trust, commissions, and agency billing in a single integrated environment. Its ACORD form generation removes significant manual work from the submission process. Its client portal capabilities have improved substantially in recent versions. For an agency managing a large book of commercial business, Applied Epic is a mature, capable platform with deep carrier integration and a large ecosystem of trained staff and implementation partners.

It is also worth acknowledging what Applied Systems has invested in over the years: the platform has absorbed capabilities through acquisition and organic development, and its integrations with carrier systems, rating platforms, and comparative raters are extensive. Applied Epic is dominant in its market for reasons that go beyond inertia — it genuinely serves the agency management use case well.

What Applied Epic Was Not Designed For: Claims Processing

Applied Epic can record a claim. It can attach documents to a claim record. It can log notes against a claim file. It can generate a first notice of loss document. For organisations with very low claims volume and minimal regulatory complexity, this may be sufficient.

But "recording" a claim is a very different capability from "processing" a claim. The distinction matters enormously as claim volume, complexity, and regulatory requirements increase. What Applied Epic lacks in claims processing is not a minor gap — it is the entire operational infrastructure that separates a tracked claim from a systematically managed one:

• Automated workflow routing. In Applied Epic, a new claim arrives and someone manually decides what happens next. In a dedicated claims platform, intake triggers an automated workflow that assigns the claim to the right adjuster, initiates the right document requests, sets the appropriate reserve, and starts the appropriate communication sequence — based on rules defined by claim type, coverage, jurisdiction, and complexity. Applied Epic has no equivalent capability.
• AI document processing. Claims generate significant document volumes: medical records, repair estimates, police reports, photographs, solicitor correspondence, expert reports. Extracting relevant data from these documents manually is time-consuming and error-prone. Applied Epic does not process document content — it stores attached files. Dedicated claims platforms use AI to extract structured data from unstructured documents at intake, eliminating manual data entry and enabling automated downstream processing.
• Fraud detection. Claims fraud detection requires pattern analysis across claim populations, linkage analysis between claimants and providers, and anomaly detection on individual claim characteristics. This is a capability that requires purpose-built analytics infrastructure and access to claims history data at scale. It does not exist in Applied Epic.
• Automated adjuster assignment. Optimal adjuster assignment considers workload, expertise, jurisdictional licensing, claim complexity, and coverage type. Automated assignment based on these criteria, with load balancing and supervisor escalation rules, is standard in dedicated claims platforms. In Applied Epic, assignment is manual.
• Claims analytics. Understanding loss development trends, reserve adequacy, average settlement times, adjuster performance, and coverage-level loss ratios requires analytics infrastructure built around claims data. Applied Epic's reporting is primarily oriented toward agency operations — premium volume, producer performance, renewal rates. Claims analytics is an afterthought at best.
• Regulatory audit trails. UK FCA compliance, Consumer Duty obligations, and the requirement to produce authenticated evidence of claims handling decisions for regulatory review requires an immutable, timestamped audit trail of every action taken on a claim. Applied Epic's activity log is not designed to meet this standard. It records user activity but does not produce the kind of tamper-evident, structured audit record that satisfies an FCA examiner or supports a legal defence.

The Gap That Costs Agencies and MGAs

When an agency or MGA uses Applied Epic as its primary claims management tool, the operational reality is typically that claims are managed through a combination of Applied Epic's limited claims functionality, email, shared drives, and individual adjuster memory. The claim record in Applied Epic becomes a filing cabinet — a place to attach documents and log notes — rather than a managed workflow with defined stages, decision points, and accountability.

The costs of this approach compound as volume and complexity increase:

Manual Processes That Should Be Automated

Adjusters working from email inboxes rather than automated work queues spend a disproportionate amount of their time on triage and routing rather than on actual claims assessment. A claims platform with automated intake and routing eliminates this overhead — the claim arrives in the right queue, with the right documents attached, with the right initial reserve calculated, and the adjuster can begin substantive work immediately. The productivity difference for a team handling meaningful claim volumes is significant.

Compliance Risk from Disconnected Workflows

When claims are managed through email and shared drives rather than a structured system, the audit trail is, at best, a collection of emails that may or may not have been retained. For UK-regulated firms, this creates serious exposure. The FCA's Consumer Duty requires firms to be able to demonstrate the basis for claims decisions. An email chain or a note in Applied Epic is not a defensible basis for that demonstration.

Beyond Consumer Duty, the claims automation capabilities that matter for regulatory compliance — structured decision documentation, reserve adequacy justification, coverage interpretation records, communication logs with claimants — simply do not exist in Applied Epic in a form that meets regulatory evidential standards.

Scaling Constraints

A manual claims process in Applied Epic that is just about manageable at 30 claims per month becomes genuinely unmanageable at 150. The same staff, the same email-based triage, the same document management by attachment — none of it scales. Organisations that grow their books of business through new binding authority arrangements or new distribution relationships frequently find that their claims process is the bottleneck, not their underwriting capacity.

How Regure Fills the Gap

Regure is a dedicated claims automation platform — built specifically for the processing, management, and compliance requirements of claims, not for the agency management requirements that Applied Epic serves well. The two systems solve different problems and, critically, they are designed to work together rather than replace each other.

Where Applied Epic holds the policy record, client relationship data, and accounting infrastructure, Regure holds the claims processing infrastructure. The integration between the two is straightforward in principle: policy and coverage data from Applied Epic informs Regure's claims intake and coverage verification; claims outcomes from Regure feed back into Applied Epic's accounting and reporting. Each system does what it was designed to do.

Regure's core claims automation capabilities include:

• Automated intake and triage. Claims arrive through multiple channels — web portal, email, API, direct submission — and are automatically parsed, classified by type and complexity, and routed to the appropriate adjuster queue.
• AI document processing. Supporting documents submitted with the claim are automatically processed through document processing AI, extracting structured data from unstructured files and populating the claim record without manual data entry.
• Configurable workflow engine. Claims move through defined stages with automated actions triggered at each transition — document requests, reserve reviews, adjuster notifications, management escalations — based on rules configured for each coverage type and jurisdiction.
• Immutable audit trails. Every action on every claim is recorded in a tamper-evident, timestamped audit log. Coverage decisions, reserve movements, payment authorisations, communication records — all captured in a format that satisfies regulatory evidential requirements.
• Claims analytics. Loss development, reserve adequacy, cycle time analysis, and adjuster performance metrics — the operational intelligence that enables proactive claims management rather than reactive fire-fighting.

For a detailed look at how Regure compares to Applied Epic across specific capability dimensions, see our Applied Epic comparison page.

The Integration Approach: Better Together

The practical question for an agency or MGA currently using Applied Epic is not "do I replace Applied Epic with Regure?" — it is "how do I add claims automation capability without disrupting the agency management infrastructure I rely on?"

The answer is integration. Applied Epic and Regure operate as complementary systems, connected through API integration that keeps the policy and claims data in sync. When a new claim is notified, it can be initiated from Applied Epic and automatically flow into Regure's claims processing workflow. When a claim closes, the outcome data flows back to Applied Epic's records. Accounting entries for claims payments are generated in the format Applied Epic requires.

This approach preserves the investment in Applied Epic, maintains the familiarity of existing staff workflows for policy and client management, and adds the dedicated claims processing infrastructure that Applied Epic does not provide. Agencies and MGAs get the best of both systems without the disruption of a full platform replacement.

The integration architecture is not hypothetical — it is how the most operationally mature agencies and MGAs in the market operate. The recognition that no single system serves every operational need optimally, and that integration between best-of-breed systems is preferable to a monolithic platform that is mediocre at everything, is a mature technology position that the most successful insurance operations have adopted.

When Applied Epic Alone Might Be Sufficient

Intellectual honesty requires acknowledging the scenario where Applied Epic's claims capabilities are genuinely sufficient for a given organisation. That scenario has two defining characteristics:

First, claims volume must be low — consistently under 50 claims per month. At this volume, the manual overhead of managing claims through Applied Epic's limited claims functionality is manageable, and the investment in a dedicated claims platform may not generate sufficient return to justify the implementation and integration costs.

Second, regulatory requirements must be minimal. If your organisation is not UK FCA-regulated, does not operate under Lloyd's delegated authority, and does not face significant litigation exposure on its claims, the evidential and compliance requirements that drive the case for immutable audit trails and structured documentation are less acute.

If your organisation meets both criteria, Applied Epic's claims functionality may be sufficient for your current needs. But it is worth noting that both criteria change as organisations grow: volume increases, regulatory requirements intensify, and the manual processes that worked at 30 claims per month become the operational constraint at 150. Building claims automation infrastructure before it becomes critical is substantially easier than retrofitting it under pressure.

The Regulatory Direction of Travel

For UK-regulated firms in particular, the trajectory of regulatory expectation makes the status quo increasingly untenable. The FCA's Consumer Duty, now fully in force, requires firms to demonstrate good outcomes for customers — not just assert them. Demonstrating good outcomes requires records. Records require structured systems. Structured systems require investment in claims infrastructure that manual processes and general-purpose agency management systems simply cannot provide.

The firms that will face the most difficult conversations with the FCA in the next two to three years are not necessarily those with the worst claims outcomes — they are the firms that cannot evidence their claims handling process because that process lived in email inboxes and Applied Epic activity logs. The question is not whether this matters; it is whether you address it now or under regulatory pressure later.

Applied Epic is excellent at managing your agency. Regure is designed to automate your claims. The organisations that perform best operationally use both systems together, letting each do what it was built for.

See the Difference in Practice

If you are currently using Applied Epic and relying on its claims functionality for a meaningful volume of claims — particularly if you are FCA-regulated, operate under delegated authority, or manage long-tail liability or professional indemnity claims — the gap between what Applied Epic provides and what a dedicated claims automation platform delivers is worth examining concretely.

Request a Regure demo to see how dedicated claims automation works alongside your existing Applied Epic environment — automated intake, AI document processing, configurable workflows, immutable audit trails, and the analytics infrastructure to manage your claims operation as a data-driven function rather than a manual one.