TRAVELERS PROP. CAS. ADDS FEATURES TO AGENCY PORTAL

Travelers Property Casualty (Hartford, $57.8 billion total assets) has launched a new electronic policy view (EPV) capability to complement its suite of electronic capabilities for agents, designed to help agents countrywide gain greater efficiencies in daily operations.

"This functionality works out well for the agents and for Travelers," says Patrick Gee, vice president, operations for personal and small commercial lines. "Agents gain efficiency and ultimately no longer have to store all paper policies," some of which are over 60 pages long, "and we are going to see similar savings in internal efficiency. It is fair to say that there will be significant savings associated with EPV because we have half-a-million customers that we mail policy changes to. Our postage and paper savings alone will be quite significant," Gee adds.

The EPV technology is a new component of Travelers Agency Portal, which provides access to many Travelers' systems, forms and applications that agencies use on a daily basis—including SEMCI technology that allows real-time quoting through agency management systems. "Agents can use Travelers policy processing systems from their own office to rate and quote and issue policies, in addition to all of the reference material and the forms that are available online," Gee says. "Much of the information is sales and marketing oriented, and we are looking to provide more and more claims information" through the portal.

Realizing the savings associated with EPV depends on how quickly agencies adopt the paperless capability and how rapidly Travelers makes EPV available to all of its agents, admits Gee. With EPV, agents can search for policy transactions and view policy paper over the Internet through a secure connection. The online view is an exact copy of the traditional paper policy received by an agency or insured. EPV can be searched for specific coverages, eliminating the time needed to obtain a paper copy of the policy and perform a search manually.

EPV replaces a "typically, manual paper-driven process where agents would have to wait for five days to receive the policy that Travelers would mail," according to Gee. "And on top of that, agents would have to file the paper in their office. Now they can access the documents from their desk and print them locally, if needed."

EPV, which displays commercial business insurance policies processed through Travelers' policy issuance systems, uses imaging to convert files into electronic images once they are received from the policy issuance systems. EPV is currently available for small business insurance policies via Travelers Agency Portal, which provides access to systems, forms and applications that independent agencies use regularly. Travelers plans to extend EPV to larger commercial accounts, as well as for personal insurance policies, in the future. The carrier also hopes to role out the EPV capability to policyholders.

Greg MacSweeney is editorial director of InformationWeek Financial Services, whose brands include Wall Street & Technology, Bank Systems & Technology, Advanced Trading, and Insurance & Technology. View Full Bio