Harleysville’s Byrne Drives Agent Ease and Efficiency

With the rollout of its AQS commercial lines and Duck Creek personal lines policy administration systems, Harleysville Insurance is poised to intensify its focus on ease of doing business, and Steve Byrne is taking a lead role in driving related technology refinements. To empower Byrne for this task, Harleysville has named him the carrier's chief architect vice president of agency and field automation technology.

Byrne has now taken on responsibility for all the technologies that interface with agents, including the accessHarleysville agent portal and integration with agency management systems for upload, download and service transactions. "I will also be managing the technologies that support our underwriters when they are servicing the agents, such as predictive modeling and our underwriting rules engine," Byrne says. "I'm also retaining my responsibilities for enterprise architecture, which includes management of our architects, our enterprise integration team, and a test automation team that we recently created."

In his new role Byrne will be a key member of Harleysville's agent technology council dedicated to understanding agent needs and expectations. Among early initiatives on Byrne's agenda are labor-saving data feeds. "We're trying to give our systems as much pre-fill and integration with third party data sources as possible, such as Experian, Proxix, Melissa and ISO, so that agents can easily do things such as VIN verification or ISO territory look-up," Byrne relates. "We're looking to eliminate data entry that agents are often asked to do."

Byrne's new responsibilities reflect Harleysville's identification of ease of doing business as its central business strategy, he says. "We want to be viewed by our agents as the company that provides the best platform for them to work with," he comments. "That will keep Harleysville foremost in their minds so that they will think of us first and bring their best business opportunities our way."

Anthony O'Donnell has covered technology in the insurance industry since 2000, when he joined the editorial staff of Insurance & Technology. As an editor and reporter for I&T and the InformationWeek Financial Services of TechWeb he has written on all areas of information ... View Full Bio