For over two decades, IQumulate Premium Funding has been helping businesses across Australia and New Zealand protect what matters most. What started with a focus on simplifying expense management has grown into trusted partnerships with many valued clients.
As it expanded to over 70 dedicated professionals across two countries, IQumulate recognised challenges with its reliance on email inboxes as makeshift workflow systems and static documents as process guides under the pressure of growth. For a company that strives for innovation and is forward thinking, these manual processes simply couldn’t keep pace with their strategic ambitions.
IQumulate needed a partner who could transform its operations while preserving the personal touch that had become its hallmark in the insurance premium funding space. This search led them to Nintex, opening a new chapter in IQumulate’s story of innovation.
When manual processes hit their limits
When growth meets outdated processes, something has to give. That’s exactly what IQumulate Premium Funding discovered as it navigated a change in ownership and took a hard look at its operational practices.
Controlling costs
As business grew, IQumulate faced a classic scaling dilemma: how to handle increasing workloads without proportionally increasing expenses.
“Volumes were going up, the cost of staff was going up, and we didn’t want to add staff and increase our costs,” says Tricia Kopka, Head of Operations and Process Improvement at IQumulate. “We had to find an alternative.”
Managing errors
The team quickly identified that a significant portion of their existing staff time wasn’t spent on value-adding activities but on fixing preventable problems.
“We recognized that there was a lot of time spent correcting manual errors,” says Wai-Lum Tang, Head of Information Technology at IQumulate. “We knew there had to be a smart, automated workflow solution that could help us do something about bad data.”
Relying on email for workflow management
The dependence on email as a workflow management tool had reached its breaking point. What once seemed like a practical solution had evolved into a cumbersome system that was drowning team members in notifications and creating communication bottlenecks.
Lacking version control
Process documentation presented another significant hurdle. The team used static Microsoft Word documents to capture their procedures — a method that made version control and process ownership challenging. Staff members often found themselves wondering if they were working from the most current document or inadvertently following outdated guidelines.
Less time to build customer relationships
Perhaps most concerning was how these inefficiencies affected IQumulate’s core values. The daily flood of forms in their internal quoting process left staff with little time to do what they valued most: building relationships with clients.
“We recognized that we needed something to keep our costs down but also let our staff focus on the client instead of having to do so many manual, inefficient tasks,” says Kopka.
Securing buy-in
The road to improvement wasn’t without its bumps. Educating key stakeholders about the benefits of automation proved challenging. It took nearly six months of careful messaging to demonstrate that automation would ultimately create better outcomes for borrowers while freeing the internal team from repetitive tasks.
Smarter systems, stronger operations
When you’re a team of 75 in a competitive industry, every minute — and every dollar — counts. IQumulate Premium Funding approached its transformation with this reality in mind, seeking partners and tools that would maximize its resources while delivering meaningful improvements.
Creating a solid foundation with process mapping
With Nintex Process Manager, the team documented approximately 150+ processes across the organization, creating clear visualizations of their current operations and imagining future improvements.
This approach proved particularly valuable for capturing institutional knowledge.
“We have employees who’ve been with the business for decades and have accumulated a wealth of knowledge,” notes Tang. “With all that expertise across the group, the challenge becomes: how do you capture and document that knowledge and then determine which processes to automate first? That’s where the Process Manager tool really helped us.”
Accelerating loan acceptance and speed to decision
By implementing a smart form solution using Nintex K2, an on-premises workflow automation tool, the team dramatically reduced the time needed to process loans.
“Instead of my team manually assessing the loan, checking the data points, typing an email, sending it to the broker, attaching it to the loan, and waiting for the response, K2 now automates the entire process,” says Kopka. “It sends an email to the broker with a link to a smart form. The broker fills out the form, and the information is automatically returned to our system, moving the loan through the workflow process without manual intervention.”
Thanks to these automated broker interactions, IQumulate improved clarity for their partners while reducing the manual effort required from their own team. Enhancing IQumulate’s speed to decisions.
Improving strategic thinking
Beyond tactical improvements, the partnership with Nintex has elevated IQumulate’s strategic planning. The company now conducts annual planning sessions specifically focused on anticipating automation needs and aligning them with corporate goals.
These sessions address critical questions about their automation pipeline and vendors they need to talk with now to be ready for projects later. By thinking proactively about automation, IQumulate has transformed it from a reactive fix to a strategic advantage.
Turning automation into a market differentiator
Today, IQumulate’s sales team approaches potential new brokers with a compelling proposition: fewer back-and-forth communications and faster turnaround times. This isn’t just a vague promise — they have documented statistics that demonstrate why they’re the better choice compared to competitors. The technology that once seemed like an internal productivity tool has become a powerful part of the company’s value proposition.
The company’s Relationship Managers (RMs) have become enthusiastic advocates for these new capabilities, seeing firsthand how they enhance client experiences. Meanwhile, leadership expresses a sentiment common in successful transformations: “Why didn’t we do this sooner?”
Rapid completion and adoption
What happens when you combine multiple Nintex solutions with committed teams and a clear vision? For IQumulate, their internal quoting project became one of their most successful transformation initiatives yet.
Despite its complexity — spanning multiple Nintex solutions, a Microsoft Document Intelligence solution, and various teams and parties — the project moved from concept to completion with remarkable speed.
“We completed it in about five to six months. From concept to production to use — this was one of the fastest turnarounds I’ve seen,” Tang notes. “It’s also been one of the best return-on-investment projects we’ve seen so far.”
Also impressive is how quickly the team has embraced the new solution. “One of our biggest concerns was that we’d build this internal quoting system, and no one would use it,” Tang says. “But we now generate 38% of quotes using the solution instead of manual input. And this is just a month and a half after release.”
Measurable time savings
The numbers tell a compelling story about the impact of IQumulate’s automation initiatives.
“Since starting this automation journey last year, we’ve saved approximately 3,000 hours of human time,” reveals Tang. “We’re no longer relying on someone to manually write and send emails. Instead, our tools automatically and efficiently send the necessary information to brokers, helping them quickly rectify any issues, speeding up loan processing, and ultimately delivering better outcomes for the borrower.”
These hours haven’t simply disappeared — they’ve been redirected toward activities that truly require human insight, creativity, and relationship-building.
More internal automation expertise
One valuable outcome of IQumulate’s partnership with Nintex has been the development of in-house automation capabilities — a strategic asset that continues to pay dividends.
“By partnering with Nintex, the team realized it could build its internal capabilities,” Tang explains. “For simpler automation processes, we use tools like Nintex RPA and Nintex Automation Cloud to handle things in-house. This helps us build our automation journey and establish a center of excellence internally.”
These newly developed skills allow the team to continuously identify and implement improvements, creating a virtuous cycle of optimization. The results speak for themselves in day-to-day operations.
“We have a task that uses RPA, saving us about 3 to 4 minutes per cycle each time it runs,” says Tang. “And we typically run this task at least 100 times a day.”
This seemingly modest time savings — just a few minutes per task — multiplies into hours of reclaimed productivity daily. More importantly, it represents IQumulate’s evolution from a company that simply uses automation tools to one that masters them, building operational excellence that will serve the organization well into the future.
Better collaboration
The technology transformation has also changed the way teams work together within IQumulate. Tang’s team has leveraged Nintex to position themselves as valued business partners to other departments.
“Whenever we introduce a new Nintex product, we bring everyone into the conversation,” says Tang. “We invite experts to showcase the product, provide training, and explain how tools like Nintex RPA can improve their workflows.”
This collaborative approach ensures buy-in from those who will be using the new tools while fostering a culture of continuous improvement. “We ask, ‘Can you see this fitting into your workspace? How can it improve your processes?’ We approach this as a partnership — we bring the solution to the team and then collaborate to figure out how to leverage it to drive improvement.”
A transformed employee experience
The impact of automation at IQumulate extends far beyond operational metrics and client relationships — it has fundamentally changed what it means to work at the company.
“Staff engagement has absolutely increased because employees are no longer stuck doing manual, repetitive tasks,” says Kopka.
This shift away from tedious work has contributed to an already strong workplace culture. “Our staff engagement is really high,” says Kopka. “In fact, we’ve won ‘Employer of the Year’ for engagement for three years running.”
Perhaps most meaningful to the team members themselves has been the restoration of work-life balance. “Overtime used to be a regular thing here. We would work two to three extra hours a day just to meet service-level agreements,” Kopka explains. “But that’s been drastically reduced. Staff aren’t staying until 7:00 PM just to get through the work.”
The transformation has been so significant that Kopka can hardly imagine where they would be without it: “If we hadn’t implemented these changes, we’d be in a very different place now. The internal impact has been tremendous.”
Looking ahead: IQumulate sets its sights on AI integration
As IQumulate Premium Funding continues its transformation journey, the company is setting its sights on the next frontier: artificial intelligence. Building on their success with process improvement and automation, they’re now exploring ways to leverage Nintex AI to further enhance the customer experience.
“I’ve definitely learned one key lesson: don’t be afraid to fail or make mistakes. Those failures often lead to valuable outcomes,” reflects Tang. “Our journey into automation really accelerated in the past two years, but it was a process that took four or five years to get to this point. My advice is to start now—don’t wait. Don’t fear failure, because the payback will come in the future.”
This forward-looking mindset — combined with their thoughtful, methodical approach to technology adoption — positions IQumulate to continue delivering innovative solutions that benefit their team, their broker partners, and ultimately, the businesses they help protect and grow.
