6 years of building Alan's operations from zero in Belgium: meet Sarah, our first ops 🇧🇪 coordinator

Alan is now live in 6 countries (France, Belgium, Canada, Spain, Senegal, Ivory Coast) and will add many more in the coming years with several launches. Someone has to build our product and operational stack there from scratch. 

I'm Sarah Decoster, and in October 2020, I was Alan's very first Operations Coordinator in Belgium. There was no playbook, and no history to lean on, just me, my experience, a growing queue of healthcare claims, and a lot of decisions to make on the fly. Six years later, the Belgium Claims team: 

- handled growth from 196 to 170,000 members

- grew to 7 ops coordinators (want to know more about what an ops coordinator is doing?)

Today I share with you what that was actually like and what that journey taught me.

In October 2020, Alan was getting started in Belgium. My job was to handle Care tickets and Claims for our earliest members here. 

In practice, it meant no tools, small teams, and figuring out, often in real time, what "excellent service" even looked like for a market Alan barely had a foothold in yet in Belgium. There was no existing process to inherit, if something needed a rule, someone had to design and document it, and often that someone was me.

When Care and Claims split into two dedicated teams in 2022, I stayed on the Claims side, and over the years the team grew to 7 members.

My own role changed along with it: less about handling every claim myself, more about documenting what I'd learned and built, so it didn't just live in my head, and turning it into something robust and reusable that others could pick up and rely on. Helping the team build the same habits and instincts I'd built up over time, rather than depending on me for every judgment call.

Before Alan, my instinct was that "doing things properly" meant checking everything, every time, avoiding any risk. Alan taught me to question the status quo while always thinking member-first and scalable. Claim after claim, we got better at separating what was smooth for our members while actually protecting us, from what just felt safe on paper. We learnt to differentiate between what we actually need vs asking any possible document to eliminate any risk.

Once you start taking that question seriously, you realize a lot of process exists to reassure the people doing the work, not to benefit the person receiving it.

A good example of this is how we handle claims linked to hospitalization reasons that could potentially not be covered. The "safe" version of this process asks every member who declares one of these reasons to submit a medical report before anything gets approved. It's thorough, and it protects us from any risk. But it's also slow, and it treats every member as a potential exception, when in reality only a small share of cases actually are. It’s a poor experience for them, and it does not scale.

So we introduced conditional approval instead: for defined hospitalization reasons, we approve the request immediately, under clear conditions. If a member doesn't meet those conditions, they know upfront that Alan won't cover the claim. We accept that a handful of cases will need correcting after the fact, in exchange for removing friction for nearly everyone else.

The result isn't just faster processing. 

Members feel trusted and taken care of from the start, instead of being treated as suspects by default,  and that's still exactly how the process runs for our members today. 

For the team, it keeps freeing up time and energy that used to go into chasing documents that, statistically, were almost never going to change the outcome. The Claims team keeps applying that same logic to any process today, which is honestly the best outcome I could hope for.

Since May 2026, I've moved on to a new chapter for myself, Belgian Market Expert Ops, starting almost from scratch, the same way I did back in 2020. I'm the local operations expert on our Belgian team; I keep expanding and deepening my knowledge, and I pass these learnings back to Alan's global product teams, allowing us to build global solutions that integrate Belgian specifics.

If you're the kind of person who'd rather ship something useful at 80% and fix the last 20% in the open than wait for 100% certainty that never comes : that's the muscle we're looking for. Come build the next version of this with us : find all the latest ops job postings here, go through our hiring guide here and apply!