Why Insurance Teams Replace SharePoint for Claims Management

There is a particular kind of technology decision that does not feel like a decision at the time. No one convened a steering group to choose SharePoint for claims. No one issued an RFP, evaluated vendors, or built a business case. The decision happened because SharePoint was already there. It was part of the Microsoft 365 licensing the organisation was paying for anyway, the IT team knew how to support it, and someone in claims needed somewhere to store documents. So folders were created, a library structure was agreed informally, and SharePoint became the claims document system by default.

Years later, the same organisation is dealing with the consequences of that non-decision. Claims handlers have developed elaborate workarounds. Compliance teams cannot produce audit trails for regulators. Adjusters spend significant portions of their working day on document retrieval rather than claims assessment. And the IT team is maintaining custom Power Automate flows that were built to approximate the workflow functionality that SharePoint was never designed to provide.

This is not a hypothetical. It is the operational reality for a significant number of insurance teams, and it is why platform replacement projects are increasingly common across the sector. This article explains how this situation develops, where SharePoint genuinely fails for claims, what the real costs are, and what a purpose-built alternative actually provides.

How Insurance Teams Ended Up on SharePoint

The path to SharePoint as a claims platform is remarkably consistent across organisations. It begins with a genuine and reasonable observation: Microsoft 365 is already licensed, and SharePoint is included. The licensing cost appears to be zero — or at least, zero marginal cost, since the M365 subscription exists regardless.

The initial use case is typically modest. A team that is working from paper files or a legacy system decides to move document storage to SharePoint. The folder structure is set up by someone with SharePoint administration access. It works for basic storage. Documents can be uploaded, downloaded, and shared with colleagues.

From there, scope creep is almost inevitable. If SharePoint can store claim documents, can it also store correspondence? Can it hold adjuster notes? Can it manage the workflow between first notification and settlement? Can it integrate with the external portal? Each of these expansions seems reasonable in isolation. Collectively, they push SharePoint far beyond what it was designed to do.

The IT team, which initially supported the move to SharePoint because it reduced the number of unsupported bespoke systems they were responsible for, finds itself building and maintaining Power Automate flows, custom SharePoint lists, and integration scripts that approximate claims workflow. The "free" platform has acquired a substantial ongoing development and maintenance cost that is charged to IT budget rather than appearing as a line item in claims technology spend.

What SharePoint Actually Does Well

Before examining where SharePoint fails for claims, it is worth being precise about what it does well. SharePoint is a capable platform within its genuine design parameters, and organisations that use it for appropriate purposes benefit from real value.

Document storage and version control for static or slowly changing documents — policies, procedures, templates, training materials — is a genuine SharePoint strength. The version history, check-in and check-out controls, and audit logging for document access provide adequate controls for this use case. Integration with the Microsoft Office suite means that documents can be edited in familiar applications and saved directly back to the library.

Collaboration on documents among a defined team is another legitimate strength. For a small team working on a shared document set, SharePoint provides a reasonable collaboration layer without requiring a specialised tool. Search within a well-organised, limited-scope SharePoint environment works adequately when document volumes are manageable and metadata is consistently applied.

These are genuinely useful capabilities. The problem is not that SharePoint is a bad product. The problem is that it is being asked to perform functions — claims workflow, regulatory evidence generation, AI-powered document processing — that it was not built for.

Where SharePoint Breaks Down for Claims Processing

No Native Claims Workflow Engine

A claims workflow has specific requirements that general document management workflow tools do not address. Claims move through defined stages — first notification of loss, acknowledgement, investigation, liability assessment, quantum assessment, settlement, closure — with different actions, approvals, and documentation requirements at each stage. Routing decisions depend on claim type, value, complexity, and the outputs of preceding stages.

SharePoint's built-in workflow capabilities, augmented by Power Automate, can model simple linear workflows. They cannot model the conditional routing, state management, reserve approval hierarchies, and exception handling that characterise real claims operations. Teams that have tried to build claims workflow on SharePoint and Power Automate report that the development effort is substantial, the result is brittle, and modifications require developer intervention for changes that a purpose-built system would handle through configuration.

A purpose-built claims workflow engine provides the conditional routing, escalation logic, and state management that claims operations require, without the development overhead of building these capabilities on a platform not designed for them.

No Tamper-Resistant Audit Trail

SharePoint maintains access logs and version history. These are useful for basic document management purposes. They are not adequate for regulatory audit trail purposes in insurance.

The FCA and the ICO both require that audit trails for insurance claims decisions be complete, accurate, and tamper-resistant. A SharePoint audit log records that a document was accessed or modified, but it does not record why a decision was made, what information was available to the decision-maker, or how the decision mapped to policy guidelines. SharePoint version history can be modified by users with sufficient permissions. There is no cryptographic integrity verification that prevents retrospective alteration of records.

For claims operations subject to FCA supervision, the inability to produce a complete, tamper-resistant audit trail for any given claim is a material compliance failure. The audit trail requirements for insurance are specific, and meeting them requires infrastructure designed for that purpose.

No Automated Document Processing

Insurance claims generate high volumes of inbound documents — medical reports, repair estimates, loss adjuster reports, third-party correspondence, supporting evidence of all kinds. Extracting relevant data from these documents, classifying them by type, routing them to the appropriate stage of the claim, and flagging inconsistencies requires AI-powered document processing capabilities.

SharePoint has no native document classification or data extraction capability. Documents are stored as files. Any intelligent processing requires custom development or third-party add-ons, each of which adds cost, complexity, and integration risk. A purpose-built claims platform incorporates automated document processing as a core capability, reducing the manual work required at each stage of a claim.

No Claims-Specific Data Model

Claims operations work with a specific set of data entities: claims, parties (policyholders, claimants, third parties, witnesses), reserves, payments, coverage determinations, liability assessments. The relationships between these entities are complex and claim-type-specific.

SharePoint's data model is built around sites, libraries, lists, and items. Mapping insurance claims data to this structure requires significant customisation and produces a data architecture that is difficult to query, difficult to report on, and difficult to maintain as requirements change. Folder structures that were reasonable for small claim volumes become unmanageable as volumes grow, and the absence of proper relational data structures means that reporting requires manual aggregation across multiple lists and libraries.

No Fraud Detection Capabilities

Fraud detection in insurance claims requires pattern analysis across multiple claims, comparison with external data sources, and the application of statistical models that identify anomalous claim characteristics. None of these capabilities are available natively in SharePoint. Teams operating on SharePoint typically perform fraud review manually, relying on adjuster experience rather than systematic analysis — which means that network fraud (where the signal is only visible across multiple claims) is largely undetectable.

No Claimant-Facing Portal

Claimant expectations have risen substantially. Policyholders expect to be able to submit supporting documents digitally, to track the progress of their claim, and to receive notifications at key milestones without having to call a contact centre. Building a claimant-facing portal that connects to SharePoint as its backend requires substantial custom development and produces an integration that is fragile and expensive to maintain.

Performance at Scale

SharePoint has documented limitations with large document library volumes. Search performance degrades as library sizes grow. The platform was not designed for the document volumes that a mid-size or large insurance operation generates. Teams that start with manageable SharePoint performance find that as claim volumes accumulate over years, search becomes slow, navigation becomes cumbersome, and the platform experiences periodic issues that affect operational continuity.

The Real Cost of "Free" SharePoint

The perceived zero marginal cost of SharePoint is the most persistent misconception about its suitability for claims management. The total cost of ownership, when properly accounted for, is typically substantial.

IT Development and Maintenance

Every workaround that has been built to extend SharePoint's capabilities — Power Automate flows, custom lists, integration scripts, search configuration — requires ongoing IT resource to maintain. When Microsoft updates the platform, these customisations may break and require remediation. When claims processes change, the customisations must be updated by someone with technical knowledge of how they were built, who may no longer be in the organisation.

Staff Workarounds and Hidden Process Costs

Where SharePoint cannot do something automatically, staff do it manually. Tracking which claims are at which stage may involve spreadsheets maintained by team leaders. Routing documents to the right adjuster may involve email. Monitoring reserve adequacy may require weekly manual reporting. Each of these workarounds consumes adjuster and management time that would not be required on a purpose-built platform.

The cost of these workarounds is not visible in IT spend, but it is present in the capacity constraint that prevents experienced adjusters from handling more complex claims.

Compliance Risk

The inability to produce adequate regulatory audit trails is not merely an operational inconvenience. An FCA supervisory review that finds that a firm cannot produce structured, tamper-resistant evidence of its claims handling processes can result in remediation requirements, skilled person reviews, or in serious cases, formal enforcement action. The financial exposure from compliance failure in this area can dwarf the cost of a purpose-built claims platform many times over.

Opportunity Cost

Perhaps the largest cost of operating on an inadequate platform is the operational improvements that are simply not possible. Automated triage, AI-assisted quantum assessment, real-time analytics on claims outcomes, proactive fraud detection — none of these capabilities can be readily added to a SharePoint-based claims operation. While competitors operating on purpose-built platforms invest in efficiency and quality improvements, the SharePoint-constrained operation remains static.

What Operations Leaders Report After Replacing SharePoint

The pattern of outcomes following migration from SharePoint to purpose-built claims platforms is consistent across the organisations that have made this transition. The improvements are most pronounced in three areas.

First, time-to-first-contact with claimants typically falls significantly. When document intake, initial triage, and claim routing happen automatically rather than through manual processes, the time between claim notification and a claimant receiving meaningful contact from an adjuster compresses substantially. This is both an operational efficiency improvement and a Consumer Duty outcome improvement.

Second, document loss and version confusion — a perennial problem in folder-based systems — is effectively eliminated. When every document is automatically associated with the correct claim and claimant through structured metadata, and when version history is maintained systematically, adjusters can trust that they are working from complete and current information.

Third, adjuster capacity improves because the proportion of working time spent on administrative tasks — finding documents, updating spreadsheets, sending status emails — decreases. Experienced adjusters can handle more complex claims when the routine administrative work is automated.

What a Purpose-Built Claims Platform Provides

A purpose-built claims platform does not simply replicate what SharePoint does, but better. It provides capabilities that are categorically unavailable in a generic document management environment.

A claims-specific data model with proper relational structure for claims, parties, coverage, reserves, and payments. A configurable workflow engine that routes claims through stages based on claim characteristics and decision outputs, with full audit trails of every routing decision. AI-powered document processing that extracts structured data from inbound documents and classifies them automatically. Claimant-facing portals that provide self-service document submission and claim tracking. Analytics dashboards that surface operational metrics and outcome data in real time.

Critically, the regulatory evidence infrastructure that makes FCA supervision and GDPR DSAR responses manageable rather than operationally disruptive.

The Migration Concern: What Happens to SharePoint History?

The question that most often delays replacement decisions is how to handle the historical data that exists in SharePoint. Years of claim documents, correspondence, and case notes represent institutional knowledge that cannot simply be abandoned.

A well-structured migration approach addresses this in two ways. Active claims — those still open at migration date — should be migrated with their associated documentation to the new platform, with careful validation that document integrity has been maintained and that the new claims records are complete.

Historical claims — those closed before migration — are typically handled through a combination of migration for claims within the regulatory retention window (typically six or seven years) and archival for older material. A read-only archive of historical SharePoint content, accessible for regulatory and DSAR purposes, resolves the retention requirement without requiring every historical document to be actively migrated to the new platform.

The migration concern is real but manageable. It should not be the factor that prevents a replacement decision from proceeding when the operational and compliance case for replacement is clear.

How Regure Compares to SharePoint for Claims

Regure is built specifically for insurance claims operations, not adapted from a general-purpose document management tool. The platform provides the claims data model, workflow engine, document processing, audit trail infrastructure, and analytics that SharePoint cannot deliver — as an integrated system rather than a collection of customisations built on top of a platform not designed for the purpose.

For a detailed technical comparison, see our Regure vs SharePoint comparison, which covers capability differences across workflow, compliance, document processing, and total cost of ownership.

The firms that are most competitive in insurance claims operations are those that have moved from generic tools to purpose-built infrastructure. If your team is still managing claims on SharePoint, the question is not whether a purpose-built platform would improve your operations — it is what the cost of delay is. To see what Regure provides in the context of your specific operational environment, request a demonstration and we will walk you through the platform with your use cases in mind.