Authority Hierarchy
Hierarchical approval thresholds: TL > £15k goes to a regional manager; payments > £50k go to the board. Manager queues, batch approve, overdue escalation, all auto-logged in Timeline.
Capabilities
Not bolt-ons. Not customisations. The shape of the approval engine.
Approval routes that escalate by value or risk. Up to £5k handler approves; £5k–£15k team leader; £15k+ regional manager; £50k+ board sign-off. Configured per workflow, per case type, per tenant.
Approvals route by role, not by name. When a manager is on leave, the next-in-role gets the queue. SLA on approvals does not depend on individual presence.
Approvers see a single queue of pending items, sortable by SLA, value, age, or case type. Filter to one workflow when you want to bulk-process; filter by SLA when you want to triage.
Sign off on twenty routine approvals in a single confirmation when nothing requires individual scrutiny. Each item still gets its own Timeline entry; the batch action gets logged too.
Approvals that age past their SLA escalate automatically: to the deputy, to the regional team, or to a parallel approver. The customer-facing SLA holds even when the approver does not.
Every approval, rejection, escalation, and threshold change is a Timeline event with actor, timestamp, resource, outcome, and severity. Carrier audits and FCA reviews get a clean approval history without anyone hunting for it.
Example Hierarchy
Every UK insurer runs something close to this. SwiftCase encodes it as workflow configuration, adjusted by ops, enforced by the platform.
Threshold
£0 – £5,000
Approver
Claims Handler
Routine settlements within standard authority. Approval is a sense-check, not a deliberation.
Threshold
£5,000 – £15,000
Approver
Team Leader
Mid-value settlements. Team leader queue, SLA 4 working hours.
Threshold
£15,000 – £50,000
Approver
Regional Manager
Higher-value or non-standard settlements. Regional manager queue, SLA same working day.
Threshold
£50,000+
Approver
Board / COO
Material settlements requiring senior sign-off. Board approval queue, full evidence pack attached.
Beyond claims: same mechanic, different resources. Authority hierarchies apply to underwriting referrals, document approvals, workflow-stage gating, and outbound communications. Same matrix, same Timeline, different fields and approvers.
Where It Applies
Total-loss values, third-party offers, ex gratia payments: all routed through the right authority level based on amount, with the engineer's evidence pack attached.
Risks outside standard appetite or with non-standard terms route to underwriting referral queues, with binding-authority limits enforced by the workflow engine.
Customer-facing communications, settlement letters, and policy documents route through approval queues before sending: same approval mechanic, different resource type.
Workflow stages can require sign-off before the case progresses. Dispute escalation, complaint closure, and FOS-bound responses all use approval gating.
FAQ
Each workflow defines its own approval matrix: trigger conditions (value, case type, risk markers, customer flags), required approver role, SLA, and escalation path on overdue. Configuration is part of workflow design, adjusted by your operations team without engineering involvement.
Role-based assignment means the next person in the role picks up the queue automatically. For named approvers (rare), each role can have a configurable deputy, and approvals re-route on out-of-office calendar entries or explicit absence flags. SLA on approvals does not pause for individual leave.
Yes. Rejection captures the reason as a structured field, returns the case to the originator with the rejection note, and logs the event in Timeline. The originator can revise and resubmit, or escalate to a discussion: both paths preserve the rejection record.
Senior Manager Conduct Rules expect personal accountability mapped to actions. The approval hierarchy is the documented mapping: who has authority for what value, what action they took, and when. Timeline produces the SMCR-relevant evidence as a side-effect of normal use.
Switchboard does not approve customer-facing decisions. It can route a case to the correct approval queue based on case data ('TL value £18,400 routes to the regional manager queue') but the approval itself is always a named human action. Auto-approval is not a configurable feature; it is excluded by design.
Approval matrices are also where binding-authority limits live for MGAs. The matrix encodes the carrier's delegated-authority terms, and the workflow engine enforces them. Carrier audits get a clean record of how authority was applied across the binder.
Pick one approval workflow that breaks at peak: claims settlement, underwriting referrals, document sign-off. Run it on SwiftCase alongside your existing process. Compare SLAs, throughput, and audit cleanliness.
