Meridian Mutual is a property and casualty insurer writing personal auto and homeowners policies in 14 states. It handles about 310,000 claims a year. Most of them start the same way: a policyholder picks up the phone.
That first call, the first notice of loss (FNOL), sets the tone for the whole claim. In 2025, Meridian rebuilt it around Pazau Voice.
The challenge
Meridian's claims contact center had 180 intake representatives across two sites. They took FNOL calls, verified the policyholder, captured the loss details, and opened the claim in Guidewire ClaimCenter. A typical intake call took 21 minutes. Much of that was the representative typing while the caller waited.
On a normal day that worked. On a catastrophe day it did not. When a hailstorm hit the Denver metro in June 2024, Meridian received 9,200 claims calls in 48 hours. Average speed to answer passed 40 minutes. Abandonment peaked at 31%. Many of those callers tried again. Some called a public adjuster instead.
Compliance was the second problem. Every state where Meridian writes has unfair claims settlement practices rules, set by its Department of Insurance. They govern how fast claims must be acknowledged, what must be disclosed, and what representatives must never say. Meridian's QA team reviewed about 2% of calls by hand. A market conduct exam could ask about any call.
Meridian also operates under state laws based on the NAIC Insurance Data Security Model Law. Any vendor touching policyholder data had to meet its requirements for risk assessment, access control, and incident notification.
"We were sampling two calls in a hundred and hoping the other ninety-eight were fine. That's not a compliance program. That's a guess." — Denise Okafor, SVP Claims Operations
Why Pazau
Meridian's claims and IT teams ran a structured evaluation in early 2025. The scoring weighted three things: voice quality under stress, integration with ClaimCenter, and evidence for regulators.
Pazau Voice handled all three. The voice agent speaks naturally, handles interruptions, and hands off warm to a human adjuster with the full transcript and a claim summary. It integrates with Guidewire ClaimCenter through Actions, so the claim is created while the caller is still talking.
The deciding factor was the trace. Every AI decision on every call records the Procedure step, the data it used, and the action it took. Meridian's compliance team could export traces for a market conduct exam in minutes.
Omar Haddad, Pazau's CISO, walked Meridian's security team through Pazau's controls against the NAIC model law requirements. SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 reports covered most of the questionnaire. Pazau Guard redacts policyholder PII before inference, and Pazau never trains foundation models on customer data.
The rollout
Meridian signed in March 2025 and started with auto claims in three states.
April: Integrate. Meridian's Guidewire team built five Actions: lookup_policy, verify_identity_kba, create_fnol, schedule_inspection, and request_rental. Voice connected to Meridian's Genesys telephony, so calls route through existing numbers and IVR menus were retired.
May: Write the Procedures. Marcus Delgado, director of claims intake, led the work with the compliance team. The core Procedure, "Auto FNOL → Open claim", runs like this:
- Check whether everyone is safe. If anyone is injured, transfer to a human immediately.
- Verify identity with knowledge-based authentication against the policy, for example MM-AU-4471-09.
- Capture date, location, loss type, other parties, and police report number.
- Open the claim in ClaimCenter with
create_fnoland read back the claim number. - Give the state-required acknowledgment and disclosures for the policyholder's state.
- Offer inspection scheduling and rental, if covered.
- Never discuss fault, coverage decisions, or settlement amounts.
Step 5 has a branch for each of the 14 states. Step 7 is enforced by a Pazau Guard policy that blocks and rewrites any response that drifts toward a coverage opinion.
June–July: Simulate and pilot. The team replayed 3,000 recorded calls through the Procedure. Then Voice went live for 10% of auto FNOL calls in Colorado, Arizona, and Texas.
September 2025: Scale. Voice took all auto FNOL calls in 14 states. Homeowners FNOL followed in January 2026.
"Adjusters were skeptical until they got their first warm transfer. The claim was already open, the photos were requested, and the summary told them exactly why the call came to them." — Marcus Delgado, Director of Claims Intake
The results
After a full year on Pazau:
- 61% of FNOL calls completed end-to-end by Voice, with the claim opened and inspection scheduled. The rest transfer warm to a human, most often for injuries or multi-vehicle losses.
- Median intake time of 7 minutes, down from 21.
- Average speed to answer under 10 seconds, including during catastrophe events.
- 100% of claims calls QA-scored by Pazau Insights, against a scorecard mapped to each state's claims-handling rules.
The real test came in May 2026, when a hailstorm hit the Dallas–Fort Worth area. Meridian received 11,400 claims calls in 48 hours, more than the 2024 Denver storm. Average speed to answer stayed under 15 seconds. Abandonment was 2%.
Compliance changed from sampling to monitoring. Insights flags any call that missed a required disclosure or ran past a state acknowledgment deadline. The compliance team reviews exceptions daily instead of hunting for them. When a state DOI requested call records for a market conduct exam in early 2026, Meridian produced complete traces in a day.
The 180 intake representatives were not replaced. Meridian retrained 60 of them as field-desk adjusters, which cut the backlog on the claims that need human judgment.
What's next
Meridian is extending Pazau Agent to claims status on chat and SMS. That is the second-largest contact driver after FNOL. It is also piloting live agent assist for its adjusters, with Voice transcribing calls and suggesting next steps from the claim file.
For Denise Okafor, the goal hasn't changed. Answer every call, open the claim, and be able to prove it was done right.