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 → 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.
