FinTech platform created by Mitra wins Prestigious Innovation Award for Leap in!

LEAP IN

Leap in! is Australia’s leading National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) plan manager, supporting thousands of Australians across the country. A progressive social enterprise, the Leap in! mission is to:

  • Enrich the lives of people with a disability, enabling them to live their best life by getting the most out of their NDIS plans
  • Innovate and connect a highly fragmented value chain of participants, families, support providers and other stakeholders
  • Assist customers to navigate complexity and become a trusted partner in supports decision making
  • Provide delightful, mainstream, digitally-led experiences to our members and their crew

In October 2021 – Leap in! was awarded second place in the Australian Financial Review (AFR) Most Innovative Companies awards in the Government and Not-for-Profit Category for the ‘Hedgehog’ solution co-created by Mitra and Leap in!

THE CHALLENGE

When Leap in! were first established, they focussed on providing a uniquely useable and accessible digital and human contact centre experience for their members, while utilising a third party to provide their core financial management, claims assessment and funds tracking and routing solution.  

As the business grew to process claims for millions of dollars and thousands of individual provider payments each week, the third-party solution was becoming more expensive, while limiting the organisation’s ability to rapidly innovate and stay a step ahead of their competitors.  

A robust, scalable and more flexible solution was needed. 

”How did Mitra contribute to delivering Hedgehog? Leap in! had already been working with Mitra for several years as a core trusted partner at the outset of project Hedgehog. Mitra understood our needs. Together with their deep technical knowledge, their quality practices supporting genuine achievement, their ability to collaborate and communicate. It was a no brainer for us to embark on this significant investment with them taking the lead on delivery.
The project was ambitious in scope and timeline, and technically complex. But when Mitra make a commitment to achieve a deadline – they deliver it. Mitra delivered an elegant, scalable and extremely reliable solution. After launch, the platform immediately pushed Leap in! into financial sustainability. From here we continue to evolve both the processing efficiencies and innovative CX improvements it presents.

Jane SheehyCTO of Leap in!

”This afternoon the Australian Financial Review (AFR) announced their Most Innovative Companies Awards for 2021. I’m excited to report that Leap in! was recognised as the 2nd most innovative company in the Government and Not-for-Profit category. The recognition was for the implementation of Hedgehog last year. It is fantastic that all the incredibly hard work by the entire Leap in! and Mitra teams to bring Hedgehog to life has been recognised amongst some incredible innovations from all over Australia. Needless to say, the Board and I am incredibly proud of everyone involved

Drew KielCEO of Leap in! 15th October 2021

THE SOLUTION

Doubling down on the cloud-first, serverless technologies already used to deliver the Leap in! member experience, the Hedgehog platform was designed by Mitra to deliver an extremely low cost, secure, resilient, scalable and flexible platform, supporting: 

  • A robust core general ledger, built on an open-source kernel, capable of processing millions of transactions a year  
  • Claim and invoice lifecycle workflow management, providing a forensic level of detail for performance and risk management, helping to automate sophisticated recovery pathways from ‘unhappy path’ claiming and settlement events 
  • Member, plan and provider lifecycle workflow management, providing a fully integrated solution suite across CRM, CX, Contact Centre, Financial Management and Banking
  • Advanced stakeholder communication components, unifying member and provider experience across native app and other digital channels, contact centre, email, to provide participant choice and control around the delivery of their plan
Claim & Invoice Status Engine

Transparency and the ability to acquire insights to make decisions at every stage of the claiming process, were two of the key business drivers for Leap in!

Delayed Payments

Automating sophisticated recovery pathways from claiming and settlement events has a major impact on the lives of the people dependent on Leap in!’s funding.

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THE RESULT

Apart from the core objective of providing a platform with fixed operating costs, several other significant business benefits were achieved, including:

  • Reduced onboarding effort for new members 
  • Greatly increased visibility of member budget status, leading to the development of improved advice – both automated and personal
  • Enhanced ability to cater for ‘unhappy path’ claims, reducing delays in payment, improved customer and provider experiences
  • More reliable and timely settlement
  • Greater rigour around reconciliation and speed to respond to settlement issues 
  • Improved visibility of the claims processing pipeline, for the development of self-service claims tracker, improved workforce management and better customer service in response to status enquiries
  • The system has not experienced any of the data integrity issues encountered with the previous solution – from the first audit, the system has been clean and reliable. 

While plan managed members and contact centre team member numbers have more than doubled since the deployment of the system, TechOps, Support and DevOps team size has remained unchanged, despite the greatly increased scope of systems supported. A testament to the elegant design and resilience of the platform as built. Hedgehog now supports Leap in! to manage over 7000 members, with one of the lowest staff to member ratios of any plan manager.

BUSINESS BENEFITS

Seamlessly managing member budgets

Transparent invoicing process for both Leap in! staff, members and providers

100% of funds allocated for third party claims processed

Easier onboarding of new members

Error free, reliable and timely settlement