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Entrepreneurial Spirit Applied to Core Systems at Kinsale Insurance

Bill Kenney, SVP and CIO of the startup excess and surplus carrier, tells Insurance & Technology how the company brought together vendor, open-source and self-developed solutions to deploy rapidly its policy administration system.

Excess and surplus lines carrier Kinsale Insurance (Richmond, Va.) opened in June 2009 with the goal to be licensed in all 50 states as quickly as possible. To meet that end, SVP and CIO Bill Kinney and his staff of 11 (plus four contractors) built a policy administration and underwriting system that facilitated a growth-focused workflow sympathetic to the unique needs of the carrier's lines of business.

This was Kinney's second startup experience — he had, along with members of the group that founded Kinsale, built James River Insurance Company, leaving to start Kinsale when James River was taken public. (Before working at James River and Kinsale, Kinney was at Colony Insurance, which like both of his following stops in the E&S business has an office in Richmond, Va.)

He credits the entrepreneurial spirit of his current company with creating a pro-innovation environment, and tells I&T how he leverages next-generation tools and experience to build a modern policy system.

Insurance & Technology: What is different about developing a policy administration system for excess and surplus as opposed to other lines of business?

Bill Kenney: Efficiency of workflow is a big deal. We can't filter out things we're not going to look at — because we're the excess market, we have to look at everything. We have to key it in. We looked for [a workflow system from a vendor], and they were all off the shelf or you had to pay them a lot to come in and customize it. We just felt we could do it as well as anyone else.

I&T: What were the main capabilities of the system you developed internally?

BK: We developed a workflow management/underwriting system that would take submissions electronically and bring them into a work queue for underwriters. In there, the underwriters rate it and can do things like attach documents. We wanted an actual statistical accounting system that one could hook into and drop transactions in that system so that they can get statistical reporting. More importantly, the claims system attached to that core transaction system was fully integrated.

I&T: You implemented a system from CGI as well. Can you talk about what that brought to the table, and how it integrated with what you developed?

BK: We didn't want to spend the time writing the receivables, policy transaction, statistical transaction. I already knew I could bolt on to the CGI system because that's what we used at Colony and James River. As much as the front end of their system has changed, the data designs haven't changed much.

I&T: What other components did you add to the system?

BK: We wanted to tie the VOIP system into the whole workflow system, so that if the claims folks wanted to record something, they could drag it out of their message queue and into the file. An admin brought us an open source product called Asterisk. Because it gives you the source code, there's so much you can do with it.

I&T: Do you feel that the current technology environment makes it easier to build a customized system such as the one you needed?

BK: Yes. When I see other insurance companies, I don't see many that have one silver bullet system. They're using BPM, enterprise service buses. They're cobbling together one solution that fits their needs. That's the beauty of open source and some of these other products. Now that we've got all these different components, and databases are easier to install, it makes it easier to develop an entire system from the ground up.

I&T: How about flexibility — does building on a foundation that combines open source, packaged and developed solutions make it easier to make necessary changes going forward?

BK: The whole point was to make these modules unpluggable and pluggable. We're standardized on the Java language because it's so readily available and it has a standard and a community behind it increasing the investment in forwarding the technology. That doesn’t mean that's where we're going to stay, but because it's componentized, it's not all one system. For example, the policy issuance piece is a separate application, but it does feed off the same database and same logic, but if we find another policy system or go into a different line of business, we could unplug this. Once you get technically savvy people, it's not so ominous a task as people make it.

Nathan Golia is senior editor of Insurance & Technology. He joined the publication in 2010 as associate editor and covers all aspects of the nexus between insurance and information technology, including mobility, distribution, core systems, customer interaction, and risk ... View Full Bio

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