Winning the Battle for Consumers, Online Interactivity: The Carrier's Secret Weapon [ Source: Priority Data ]

July 2010- Millions of consumers who want to work directly with an agent are still beginning their search for insurance quotes online. They are tech savvy, and expect to find user-friendly, interactive websites that deliver the information they want quickly, without having to pick up the phone or wait for a call. Regional and super-regional carriers have been slow to offer an option to consumers who research online. They have relied on their independent agents entirely. This ...

Smarter Underwriting: New Strategies for Cost Control and Pricing Precision Using Decision Management [ Source: FICO ]

January 2010- Today insurance carriers are extending the efficiencies achieved through back office automation to point-of-sale (POS) decision making across all channels, including self-service websites, in-house sales and agent/distributor networks. New Decision Management solutions not only facilitate straight-through-processing, by improving the quality of inbound data, they also increase the accuracy, objectivity and consistency of underwriting and application decisions, even when business volume is rising rapidly. In addition, by providing deeper insights into loss risk, Decision Management ...

CSC's Java-based POINT IN J [ Source: TechWeb ]

January 2009- CSC introduces POINT IN J, a Java-based policy administration system that has wide-spread appeal both to legacy insurers and to new entrants to the insurance industry. POINT IN J heralds a new era of policy admin systems.

Western Agricultural Insurance Company Rapidly Launches Commercial Agriculture Insurance Product with CSC's BPO Services [ Source: CSC ]

March 2007- The trend toward vertical integration of farming has created both challenges and opportunities for insurance carriers. Western Agricultural Insurance Company of West Des Moines, Iowa, saw an opportunity to introduce a new integrated insurance product for commercial agriculture, giving policyholders much greater flexibility than anything offered by competitors. Unfortunately, Western Ag’s commercial lines operations weren’t set up to support the company’s new initiatives. The company had grown through mergers, resulting in three ...

Norwich Union Extends Processing to Brokers, Call Operations and Banks [ Source: CSC ]

March 2006- After a series of high-profile mergers, Norwich Union needed to consolidate large books of business on an administration system capable of processing 5 million policies. Rather than cobble together multiple legacy systems, Norwich Union talked to CSC about co-developing a Web browser-based administration system. Collaborating with Norwich Union and three other carriers in the United States, CSC invested three years and $28 million in CSC’s Exceed, an integrated set of software components designed to extend, enhance ...

Speeding Delivery - York Fire maintains competitive edge by adopting iter8's exception-based underwriting technology [ Source: iter8 Inc. ]

September 2007- York Fire and Casualty Insurance Company, a subsidiary of Kingsway Financial Services Inc., recognized that in order to support the company’s rapid growth major changes in underwriting were required. Manual processing needed to be phased out, and a flexible, user-friendly system needed to be brought in. The challenge was to automate underwriting and rating to increase efficiency, improve speed of processing, attract new brokers, and improve policy holder retention. The answer was a partnership ...

8 smart reasons to deploy fully automated agent connectivity [ Source: iter8 Inc. ]

November 2007- Insurers that use an independent agent channel to handle all, or a sub-set of their sales efforts do so to leverage market knowledge and on-the-ground readiness, receiving the benefits of a broad-based channel with local presence that can reach into even the smallest geographic centers, while avoiding the direct costs of representatives to staff it. The effectiveness of the channel is dependent on all agencies interacting with the carrier in a seamless manner, so that ...

Taking Policy Administration System Transformation 'One Bite at a Time' [ Source: Diamond Management & Technology Consultants ]

April 2008- Most insurance carriers are placing policy administration system (PAS) transformation near the top of their to-do lists for the coming year, and many of these companies will expect a dramatic change in business results by moving PAS to the forefront of daily business operations. However, it is critical that carriers do not underestimate the operational challenges associated with replacing an existing PAS platform, because it will require changes to nearly every business process and technical ...