How SmartCircle Finanz scales its back office with Modus
A case study with SmartCircle Finanz from Bielefeld.
Pascal · Managing Director, SmartCircle Finanz
1.5 hrs
less admin per day
30 %
faster case handling
20 %
more time for advisory
Industry
Insurance broker
Location
Bielefeld
In use
Modus, the AI-native operating system
SmartCircle Finanz grew faster than its back office
SmartCircle Finanz is based in Bielefeld. As the firm grew, the operational load on the back office rose sharply.
Growth was never the problem. The operational load behind it was. With growth came the familiar pains:
- rising service requests
- fragmented tools
- manual rework
- growing pressure on SLAs and customer satisfaction
75 %
of working time went into administration, not advisory or sales.
Every message went through the same manual process
Each employee received roughly 200 incoming emails and 35 outgoing messages per week. Often with policies, claims documents, or follow-up questions from insurers.
Growth, more admin, more staff
More growth automatically meant more administrative work. Every task was essential, but it created no direct value and tied up capacity that was missing for advisory and sales. SmartCircle Finanz hit a clear ceiling.
So SmartCircle Finanz tackled the root cause: three structural levers
SmartCircle Finanz moved to an AI-native operating system: Modus. Operational control stays entirely with the broker. The AI makes no decisions. It structures information, prepares processes, and supports the work transparently and traceably.
Universal Inbox
All incoming information, whether emails, documents, WhatsApp messages, phone notes, internal chats, or data from the MVP, CRM, and to-do manager, comes together in one place, is understood automatically, and is turned into concrete tasks. Policies, claims reports, or follow-up questions land directly in the right case and the matching customer context.
1 hr less back office per day
No process breaks
Before: open the email, transfer the information, switch to the MVP, enter the data twice. Today, email, MVP, and platform are fully synchronized. No system switching, no double data entry, no loss of information. The result is a seamless workflow.
A seamless workflow instead of system switching
AI-supported automation
Automatically generated email drafts, smart follow-ups, context-based reminders, pre-checking of documents, and the automatic creation of cases and tasks based on recognized content. Incoming emails are assigned directly to the right customer and set up as a structured case.
8 min less per email, 6 hrs per month
A real case, step by step
Example: address change. A case that comes up every day in any brokerage and shows what concretely changes in daily work.
Inbox · Client email
„Hello, we've moved. Please update our address for all active policies. New address: Musterstraße 12, 10115 Berlin.“
Read the email, find the client in the BMS, pull the affected policies, change the address in every policy, write a confirmation, document the case.
- Modus recognises the case type address change and automatically assigns the email to the right client and their policies.
- It creates a structured case with a task, owner and priority.
- It drafts a reply with the new address. The employee reviews and sends.
„Our mornings used to disappear into sifting through emails before the actual work even began. Today a lot arrives already pre-sorted, we see immediately what needs doing, and the team's day is noticeably calmer.“
Operational time became revenue time
Administration hasn't disappeared. But it no longer dictates the day. The system keeps learning: with every case handled, it improves its assignments, task logic, and suggestions, and adapts to each broker's way of working.
„We wanted to grow without having to hire again for every wave of new customers. That's exactly what we can do now: the team has stayed the same size, and the time freed up goes into advisory and new mandates.“
Pascal, Managing Director, SmartCircle FinanzMore sales and advisory
+20 %
more time for personal customer advisory and new-client acquisition. The time gained went directly into advisory and sales.
Scaling without proportional staff growth
Growth used to come with additional hires. Today it is based on higher efficiency per employee. SmartCircle Finanz was able to increase business volume without growing the team to the same degree. This noticeably improves profitability and predictability.
