Insurance Claims & Underwriting Forms

Insurance operates at the exact intersection where sensitive data is most concentrated: medical history, family disease background, mental-health treatment, income, assets, occupational risks, driving records, and detailed narratives of accidents and losses. An underwriting questionnaire or a claim form often compresses more sensitive personal information into a single submission than any other document a person ever sends. Yet many insurers and brokers still collect that information through general-purpose online forms whose provider can read every field before it ever reaches the underwriter.

Schweizerform is built on the opposite premise. Every submission — a life-insurance health questionnaire, a disability claim narrative, a household damage report, a broker intake form — is encrypted in the applicant's browser before it reaches our servers. We physically cannot read it. For Swiss insurers, brokers, third-party administrators, and European groups operating under Solvency II, that property — combined with Swiss hosting and nFADP-aligned architecture — turns the online intake channel from a regulatory liability into a defensible control.

Why Generic Form Tools Fail Insurance Workflows

Most online form tools operate on a conventional SaaS model: the applicant's browser sends plain-text data over HTTPS, and the provider's server stores it. That server can read everything. So can the provider's staff, their integration partners, anyone who compromises their infrastructure, and any authority that serves a lawful order on the provider.

For low-sensitivity forms — quote-request surveys, marketing preference capture — that model is fine. For an insurer collecting an underwriting medical questionnaire or a detailed claim narrative, it creates a very specific and avoidable problem: the applicant's full medical and financial profile sits in plain text on a third-party server, typically outside Switzerland, often in US-hosted cloud regions.

• A life-insurance applicant discloses a prior cancer diagnosis, prescribed medications, and family history; the provider's database contains a readable medical profile before the underwriter sees it
• A disability claim describes the exact mechanism of an injury, the treating specialists, and an ongoing mental-health treatment; every word sits on the provider's infrastructure
• A mental-health coverage form names specific diagnoses and treatment facilities; that content is indexed by the provider's analytics and backed up offsite
• A household damage claim uploads photos of personal interiors, valuables, and sometimes sensitive documents such as passports or bank statements; those files are scanned, cached by a CDN, and processed in US-hosted cloud regions
• A data-access request or subpoena targets the form vendor; the request reaches a policyholder's medical and financial life without the policyholder ever being notified

How Schweizerform Preserves Confidentiality Across the Insurance Workflow

Schweizerform is a zero-knowledge end-to-end encrypted form platform. The encryption happens in the applicant's browser, before any data leaves their device. Only holders of the form's Access Code can decrypt submissions. We — the provider — cannot.

Concrete Insurance Use Cases

Life and disability underwriting

Life and disability cover require detailed medical questionnaires, family-history disclosures, and often lifestyle and occupational risk answers. A zero-knowledge form replaces the scan-and-email workflow with a structured, encrypted channel. Every answer is encrypted in the applicant's browser; the underwriter opens the file inside the carrier's own browser and moves the content into the underwriting system.

Health-insurance intake and reimbursement submissions

Voluntary supplementary health-insurance products and reimbursement requests collect diagnosis codes, prescriptions, invoices, and treatment summaries. Routing these through a zero-knowledge form keeps the raw clinical content under the insurer's control and removes the vendor from the disclosure scope entirely.

P&C claims — household, motor, travel

Property and casualty claims often include photos of personal interiors and valuables, police reports, and narrative descriptions of the incident. Encrypting all of it in the claimant's browser before submission keeps a detailed picture of someone's home or vehicle out of the form vendor's cache, CDN, and backup system.

Broker intake and mandate onboarding

Independent brokers and agents collect the same kind of data as direct insurers but typically with fewer enterprise controls. A Schweizerform intake channel gives a small broker the same architectural guarantee as a large carrier: the vendor cannot read submissions, regardless of firm size or IT budget.

Mental-health and sensitive-coverage questionnaires

Mental-health treatment, fertility care, HIV status, pregnancy, and certain genetic history fields are particularly sensitive. A zero-knowledge channel materially reduces the number of third parties who could theoretically read those disclosures, which in turn makes applicants more willing to answer honestly.

Group-policy employee onboarding

When a corporate policy requires individual medical evidence from covered employees, the employer itself should not be in the read path. A per-employee encrypted submission, decryptable only by the insurer's underwriting team, keeps sensitive employee health information away from HR and line managers while still letting the policy be underwritten correctly.

What Policyholders, Regulators, and Subpoenas See

Regulatory Context: VAG, FINMA, VVG, Solvency II, GDPR, nFADP

Swiss insurers operate under the Insurance Supervision Act (VAG / ISA) and its implementing ordinance, supervised by FINMA. The Insurance Contract Act (VVG / LCA) governs the relationship with policyholders, including obligations of good faith and limits on insurer use of disclosed information. Insurance intermediaries are supervised under FINMA-recognised self-regulation and (for financial-services elements) under FinSA/FIDLEG and FinIA/FINIG where applicable. FINMA Circular 2018/3 on outsourcing, updated through subsequent operational-risk guidance, sets expectations for how regulated entities govern third-party processing.

European insurers work under Solvency II, the EU Insurance Distribution Directive (IDD), and the GDPR — where health data is a special category under Art. 9. Across all of these, the theme is the same: the insurer or intermediary remains accountable for the data it collects, including data that transits third-party form vendors. A zero-knowledge channel narrows that accountability surface in practice, because the vendor never holds the data in a form it could be compelled to produce.

Features Relevant to Insurance

• Zero-knowledge end-to-end encryption on every submission — no provider read access to medical or claims content
• Encrypted document and image uploads — medical reports, diagnostic images, invoices, damage photos, ID documents
• Multi-language forms (EN / DE / FR / IT) out of the box — essential for Swiss cross-cantonal policyholders and for carriers operating across language regions
• Per-form Access Codes scoped to underwriting, claims, or a specific broker desk
• Swiss hosting with nFADP-aligned data-processing posture — response payloads do not leave Switzerland
• Audit log of access events (who opened a submission, when) without exposing the content
• Structured data export after decryption, for feeding into core policy or claims systems inside the carrier
• Free tier for a broker or a single underwriting experiment before firm-wide rollout

Common Objections

"Our core policy system already has a customer portal."

Enterprise policy portals are well-suited to active policyholders. They are often poorly suited to first-touch intake, broker onboarding, or one-off claims from occasional customers. A zero-knowledge form sits at the entry point — before a portal login exists — and complements rather than replaces the existing portal.

"If we lose the Access Code, we lose the submission."

Correct, and deliberate. Recommended practice is documented key custody: a sealed Access Code at the carrier, split custody between underwriting and risk, or a hardware security module. It avoids single-person failure while preserving the 'the vendor cannot be compelled to produce what it cannot read' property.

"We need to integrate submissions into our core system."

Integrations run after decryption, either on the handler's workstation or on a carrier-controlled server that decrypts and forwards. The encrypted submission is decrypted in-browser and then exported into the policy or claims system. An integration on our server is by definition impossible — we do not have the keys.

"Applicants expect to send forms by email."

Email is habit, but for health and financial disclosures it is increasingly hard to defend: unencrypted between mail servers, retained on personal devices, searchable by anyone with later access to the account. A branded encrypted form is often more credible than an ad-hoc email to a policyholder already worried about medical privacy, and it is demonstrably safer.

Rolling Out a Schweizerform Intake Channel

The Bottom Line

Insurance concentrates more sensitive personal data into a single submission than most other business workflows. A form tool that can read every field of an underwriting questionnaire or a claim — however slick its UI, however low its per-form price — is an outsourcing dependency that regulators, policyholders, and plaintiffs will scrutinise harder every year.

Schweizerform offers a direct answer: zero-knowledge end-to-end encryption on every form, Swiss hosting, and a posture aligned with FINMA operational-risk expectations and nFADP requirements. No paid upgrade for security. No US-cloud dependency for response data. No third-party-readable copy of policyholder medical and financial disclosures on a server you do not control.