If you’ve ever filed a claim, you know—it’s not always the smoothest experience. You submit your claim, then you wait. Maybe you get a call. Maybe you’re asked for more paperwork. Maybe it gets kicked back to you for something small like a missing receipt. It’s a lot of back and forth.
But what if that entire journey could be automated end-to-end? No friction, no waiting, no phone tag. That’s the promise of straight-through processing (STP)
So today we’re going to break it down.
What does straight-through processing actually look like in practice?
What does it take to build a digital claims pipeline that works?
How do we do it in a way that actually makes the experience better for people, not just faster for the system?
What is STP?
No it's not Stone Temple Pilots
Straight-through processing means that a claim—or any transaction—can go from intake to resolution without any human intervention. That doesn’t mean people are out of the loop completely. It means the routine, rule-based stuff is handled automatically.
So for an insurance claim, STP might look like this:
a customer files a claim online, uploads their documents
the system instantly verifies the data
checks it against policy rules
runs it through a fraud detection algorithm, and
if it all checks out—approves the claim.
This is all done automatically within minutes.
For simple, low-risk claims—like a windshield chip or a lost luggage reimbursement—STP is a no-brainer. It’s efficient. It’s fast.
The magic here isn’t just about automation. It’s about designing the whole process to support automation. And that’s where most organizations stumble.
It starts with data
You can’t automate what you can’t understand.
The first pillar of any digital STP process is structured, complete, and reliable data.
If you want STP to work, data collection has to be intentional. Every field needs to be machine-readable. Every document needs to be tagged, categorized, scanned for metadata. More importantly, you need to validate at the point of entry. Don’t let a customer submit a claim with missing data. Use smart forms, real-time validation, drop-downs, and file checks.
What may feel like a minor convenience for the user becomes a massive accelerator for the system.
Automating decision logic
STP depends on having clearly defined, consistently applied rules that the system can follow.
Most insurance organizations have those rules in a PDF manuals, legacy systems, or just the heads of claims adjusters.
You have to codify them—translate that knowledge into decision trees, rules engines, or even machine learning models for more complex evaluations.
This isn’t just about technology. This is collaboration. Claims teams, policy teams, legal teams—they all need to come together and agree:
Exception handling with purpose
Not every claim can be automated.
The goal of STP isn’t to handle every claim without a human. It’s to handle the right claims—and free up your people to handle the exceptions. The key is when something can’t be processed straight through, the handoff to a human needs to be seamless.
The system should already have done 80% of the work: collected the data, flagged the issue, provided context. That way, the adjuster isn’t starting from scratch—they’re stepping in to make a judgment call.
That’s how you scale. You let your team focus on the edge cases, the tricky ones, the ones where empathy or expertise really matter. That’s where human value lives.
Don’t forget the experience
Yes STP is about efficiency, but at the core, it’s about experience.
When something can’t be automated, the experience still matters. A fast response. A clear message. An option to talk to someone. STP doesn’t mean removing humans—it means deploying them where they make the most impact.
