Insight: A Sword Insurance Blog

The New Website

Posted by Mason Power - May 20th, 2010 at 01:05:22 am

When the Sword Group acquired AgencyPort in November 2009 (announced in the press and on this blog), the story centered around enhancing what AgencyPort had to offer in insurance technology solutions and how AgencyPort could expand into new global markets.

Today we announce our new web site which describes how AgencyPort and other Sword solutions fit together to offer the insurance industry a unique combination of products that can be bought independently as best of breed components or purchased together as a bundled package.

Each of our solutions helps our clients grow their market share, expand into new markets, and improve their producer and policyholder satisfaction. While we offer products that enable a better customer experience throughout more of a customer lifecycle from sales to policy servicing and client support, we are still known for being quick to market with solutions that deliver immediate business value.

In a few months’ time since joining Sword, we have come together with the teams at Sword Intech (provider of the most flexible single system for policy administration, claims and billing used by over 60 P&C carriers in the UK, US, Bermuda, Europe and elsewhere) and Sword Ciboodle (with whom we are building on their leading platform for service center CRM applications and workflow and developing a CRM for insurance) to define this new combination of distribution, policy administration, CRM and business intelligence tools (have you seen our book analytics and risk aggregation service?).

While we are still laser-focused on the U.S. market, we have also begun to leverage what Sword can offer in taking AgencyPort solutions to new markets. I write today from London where we now have Sword AgencyPort staff working full-time on solutions for the Lloyd’s, London and European markets.

We have taken our new and enhanced story on the road to clients, had an independent third party survey our clients and spoken at length with our trusted partners at Novarica, Celent, Forrester and Gartner. Thank you for the help, and from your insight we have enhanced our collective product roadmaps and built demonstration systems combining our products.

We chose to release this new website on the eve of the annual ACORD Forum in Las Vegas because we are ready to show you our products and how they fit together. Please stop by our booth at ACORD (booth #341) and see the new set of solutions from AgencyPort such as a working portal on a mobile device and let us introduce you to the new insurance division at Sword.

Agency Bulk Export & You

Posted by Mason Power - April 26th, 2010 at 10:04:25 am

To clarify the systems landscape for bulk transfer from agencies to carriers and where our BookSmart product fits here’s a breakdown by agency management system vendor:

Vertafore

Agencies using most versions of most Vertafore agency management systems can create a batch file of the multiple policies in a particular book of business.

The format can be either AL3 with an ACORD XML wrapper or ACORD XML.

The bulk export is then sent to a carrier and carriers with Vertafore’s Transit Server product have the book of business posted to AgencyPort’s Booksmart.

BookSmart breaks down the bulk file to validate and correct the policy data, transform and normalize it for downstream rating and core processing systems, and enable ad hoc user-generated reporting to determine the suitability of the book of business.

Sifting through thousands of records to find the desirable policies previously was inefficient and ineffective. Seven insurance carriers have now demonstrated that using BookSmart saves huge amounts of time and money and greatly enhances the quality of book analysis.

Among our seven installations to date, this bulk export method has proven to be the best method for book rolling.

Should your agents not be able to export in bulk from Vertafore they can create AL3 files for each policy and send them via TransactNow and on to BookSmart, but this requires the agent to pull each and every policy, a less than happy user experience for them.

Applied Systems

While Agents can pull individual policies and upload them via Transformation Station to BookSmart (we have a customer who is finding success here), bulk export as described above is not available and is not on the foreseeable Applied roadmap (due to lack of agent demand). However, we understand from some carriers that Applied covertly supports a method where agents can export in Excel after generating a custom report out of Applied. Talk to us about how we can help carriers process these excel sheets on the other end.

Other agency management systems

None have provided our customers with specifications for their bulk export capabilities. We’re live with single policy upload from many comparative raters and we’re working on Hawksoft and Appulate. If you work at these or at an agency management system vendor, we’d love to hear from you if you can support bulk export.

In general , for any agency system vendor that can export ACORD standard formats – AL3 or XML – BookSmart can pull policies in one by one in through the browser, or in bulk by uploading a zip file. So really, no matter the originating system, as long as you can get the data in ACORD format, you can get it into BookSmart without custom integration work or transport middleware.

Agency Interface: Why AgencyConnect?

Posted by Mason Power - February 4th, 2010 at 06:02:57 pm

Today we presented our AgencyConnect solution at an industry event about real-time agency interface.

The upside of the presentation format was explaining to 170 people how we are the most experienced provider in the space with over 40 implementations of AgencyConnect – our software handles multiple formats of inbound messages across disparate systems (e.g. agency management systems, comparative raters) for multiple transaction types (quote, bridging) for many coverage types in many states via all of the transport vehicles (TransactNow, Transformation Station). We do this for individual transactions and for bulk transfer such as for book rolling.

The downside was trying to cram this story into a 6-minute speaking slot.

The result is the slide show below which shows the challenges facing carrier CIOs in navigating a complicated space. AgencyConnect insulates carriers from the current chaos and the inevitable changes coming by normalizing this traffic into one standard ACORD XML output to be integrated with carrier systems such as point of sale, policy administration or rating engines.

Contact us if you would like to leverage our experience and be a leading carrier in the minds of agents who are dying for efficient upload and real-time interface.

2009: The Year in Review (Part 2 of 2)

Posted by Mason Power - December 24th, 2009 at 09:12:48 am

Continuing the previous post, we wanted to highlight some achievements and fun times we’ve had with clients, these from the latter half of the year:

First, we saw a client sign up for software only and rely entirely on their own staff to implement AgencyPortal. With only standard training and 40 hours of “kickstart” services, this project validated the notion that using the ToolKit could empower clients to decide on using our staff, a third party system integrator or their own staff for part or all of the implementation. On the topic of training, we conducted 5 training classes educating over 20 developers who work for clients and partners. Clients have been demanding this form of empowerment and choice and market feedback places us on the bleeding edge in delivering on the toolkit approach.

This summer, in an effort to impress potential acquiring companies, Steve and Eric beefed up the experience level of the team. One of them, with 35 years in insurance technology, still loves to go out with clients. We are glad to have welcomed Bob Dolan to the team in 2009 and enjoyed his visionary leadership, shown here at a company off-site near our Portsmouth, NH office.

This summer, Hiscox was the first to go live with our CoverIQ solution to normalize inbound premium and exposure data from coverholders to give Hiscox an edge in modeling North American property faster and with cleaner data and by offering its coverholders a better experience in managing bordereau reporting.

Gary Brach, CEO, upon returning in late September from Jackson Hole in time to address the opening session of the User Conference only to waste everyone’s time with a 25-minute description of how elks mate. Getting in deep about the rut and how males lock horns in order to woo the right female, Gary related this mating ritual to the insurance technology space, asking why all vendors couldn’t all just get along. This speech inspires graphic designers in the audience to adapt a famous image of hope to the Gary Elk story (or “GELK” as it has become known).

Before Gary enlightened the audience, AgencyPort management premiered the “Castoff Video” where Curt Stevenson comes the rescue of Gary, Eric & Steve who were lost at sea. See the team, thinking they were gone forever, discuss their regrets and hopes for the insurance technology industry.

This year’s User Conference featured our clients leading most of the sessions, a change that was well-received. To show our appreciation of General Casualty’s Todd Chesbro for volunteering to lead one of the most popular sessions, we let Todd clean up that night’s after-party. Thanks Todd!

We were lucky to have WR Berkley lead conference sessions (and some rousing Bon Jovi karaoke later) and Hartford leading a session about implementing distribution technology in a large enterprise (and dancing lessons that night).

We’re proud to have helped Kemper achieve a Top 10 ranking in INN’s recently-published list of the Top 10 innovations in the use of insurance technology (our BookSmart) for reducing the costs of book rolling by 25%.

This fall we achieved the Gold Ranking for Novarica ACE Rankings for both AgencyPortal (ranking here) and AgencyConnect (ranking here), which are based on client feedback and validate the impact our technology has on driving efficient trading for our clients.

After 9 years of building a business from scratch to having implemented 70+ projects across 53 clients (all of whom still stay with us, buy our other products, come to our conferences and act as references) and building a team of colleagues you’d love to work with, AgencyPort proudly sold itself and the team stays intact as part of the Sword Group.

At our year-end holiday party, four members of the team celebrated their 5-year anniversary with the company, all four are great at their jobs, but also have personal hobbies and interests. In typical AgencyPort fashion, we celebrated these personal interests with the attached magazine covers (were they expecting a gold watch instead?). Marcia Berner was so grateful for her gift that she decided to leave the company. We wish her the best in her new job. Coincidentally to the investigative journalists who published her magazine cover, she’s joining ACORD and yet she denies the allegations implied in her magazine cover…

Among the many projects with a successful conclusion this year (e.g. Tower Insurance went live for workers comp on our newest product, ProgramIQ), we completed a four-year project for ACIC to transform point of sale for Homeowners and Personal Auto.

Rounding out a strong year for Steve Hauck, where Steve was tapped by Sword to lead all of Sword’s insurance activities in the Americas, was his getting kicked out of his own New York office Christmas party by a bouncer.

2009: The Year in Review (Part 1 of 2)

Posted by Mason Power - December 23rd, 2009 at 08:12:05 am

Looking back on 2009, it’s been a year packed with highlights, none bigger than adding more clients to our roster, introducing innovative new products and closing out some significant implementations. Oh yeah, we also sold the business after 9 years.

This post hopefully comes before you’re tired of the retrospective “2009 year in review” specials on tv, and focuses on the achievements we’ve made for our clients and the fun we’ve had with them along the way. Happy Holidays to all.

New clients we added in 2009 include MiddleOak, LUBA, Fireman’s Fund, Lexington, The Hartford, Berkley FinSecure, Harleysville, Safety, Hortica, Western Reserve Group, CompSource and Chubb Specialty. We work for our clients every day and are honored to be chosen by these reputable firms.

In January, an existing client, General Casualty, won a prestigious award judged by analysts Celent. In naming the components of a model carrier based on effective use of technology, General Casualty’s use of AgencyPortal won for “Personal Lines Agency Point of Sale Enhancements”. We were also recognized by Inc. Magazine as one of America’s Fastest Growing Private Companies and Boston Business Journal for its Pacesetter Award.

ACORD’s annual conference in May is our biggest industry event of the year and there were a series of highlights:

ACORD was the end of the Agent Insight Tour where we interviewed 66 independent agencies about using technology to conduct business with carriers. The team of folks on staff who pulled off this feat should be very proud, it was a strategy/R&D home run for us. The tour was also the official launch of this blog.

Penn National won the ACORD innovative implementation award for using the Interview module with AgencyConnect. Continental Western Group won another ACORD award for “Real Time Implementation & Download Implementations” (same link).

Have you seen our matrix of AgencyConnect support for comparative raters, agency management systems etc? Call us, we’ll be happy to show you how far you can reach using one product and one knowledgeable team.

Commerce won INN’s VIP award honorable mention published around the ACORD conference for implementing our AgencyPortal and AgencyConnect for their homeowners’ book.

ACORD was also the official release of AgencyPortal 4.0 which, among other terrific product enhancements, delivered version 1 of our ToolKit. Now clients can build and maintain their web portals easily and without hard-coding. The ToolKit demonstrates our commitment to staying ahead of the competition in delivering multi-channel product distribution solutions to P&C carriers.

Later in the week at ACORD we had a client outing to a nearby nightclub where we rubbed shoulders with Dwight Howard and the Orlando Magic. Interesting as this was, our clients seemed to talk more about the trip back that night and the exposure they got to our partner Edgewater.

Use innovation to successfully drive business impact

Posted by Mason Power - November 9th, 2009 at 11:11:11 am

Insurance Networking News (INN) wanted to educate readers about how carriers, brokers and agents are leveraging technology to improve sales and profits.

We’re proud to have helped Kemper achieve a Top 10 ranking in INN’s recently-published list of the Top 10 innovations.

Kemper is one of four live BookSmart implementations and Kemper utilizes BookSmart in 2 ways:

First, Kemper uses BookSmart to quickly (and without re-keying by agents nor Kemper staff) determine whether agents’ books are more or less likely to produce losses. Second, Kemper uses BookSmart to move books into their Point of Sale System.  These are the steps in a typical “Book Rolling”.

By using BookSmart, Kemper has seen a 25% reduction in the cost of book rolling, as they are no longer keying the risks in manually.  They have also seen positive responses from their agent’s who are spending less time photocopying declaration pages or printing out applications.  One agent even commented, “You know more about my book of business than I did.”

The innovation was achieved through the reduction of keystrokes (which saves everyone time and reduces errors) and the insight gained by Kemper in determining how an agent’s book of business would fit in Kemper’s appetite.

Data collection through an easy-to-use web upload + data validation/correction/normalization + rich exposure analytics + single thread ACORD XML feed to point of sale system = Business impact at Kemper.

User Conference Lessons Learned – BookSmart

Posted by Mason Power - October 2nd, 2009 at 09:10:36 am

Among the many “aha moments” at this year’s User Conference came several revelations about BookSmart.

If you weren’t able to attend AgencyPort’s User Conference, this is the first in a series of posts on what attendees learned. Contact us

to learn more for yourself, we’re happy to reprise the presentation for you, although you’ll need to attend next year’s conference to benefit from the interaction with peers at other customers.

BookSmart readies an entire book of business for analysis and for export to back-office systems – and saves carriers from having to re-key the data. When agencies can send the policy information for these book rolls via TransAct Now or Transformation Station, everybody wins. BookSmart, however, can still handle spreadsheet uploads as well.

During the first of two sessions dedicated to BookSmart, AgencyPort’s Chris Arnold and Max Tyler reminded User Conference attendees of the Update proceedures in BookSmart. Using the image to the right to underscore the theme that BookSmart helps the carrier more quickly and accurately sift through bulk uploads of data to compare policies to carrier appetite.

From their slide deck: Updates are performed for two reasons – to correct bad data and/or to meet the requirements of the book transfer agreement. Updates are done either automatically based on product definitions or are user-initiated. Either way they can be done on import and/or on export. Basically, BookSmart Update = Flexible and the resulting normalized data set = quick response to agent and deeper understanding of the book of business.

We heard in a later Customer Spotlight session where The Hanover Insurance Group described their implementation and other BookSmart clients in the crowd added their two cents, that the key to update is the ability to sift through large amounts of data to find what is specifically of interest. Beyond the value of data correction and validation (bumping & slotting anyone??) as part of the update process, the BookSmart customer spotlight session compared what each of the clients currently do with BookSmart and what they could or will be doing.

This is similar to a recent post on the many uses of BookSmart (Part I and Part II) where attendees discussed how it can help transfer books of business between carriers (M&A activity is up); help rate or model products (actuaries love usable data); converting from one insurance policy administration system to another; and even keeping track of which underwriting rules get tripped most often by bulk uploads of policies (are you too tight with your rules?).

Finally, the revelations at User Conference around BookSmart finished with the future – the BookSmart product roadmap which includes “going commercial” and enhanced reporting and analytics. Underpinning all of the great applications for the software is a team of experienced service professionals and Chris & Max felt the image to the left best exemplified them as a team.

I realize this is more of a series of teasers, but who wants to read long blog posts? Contact us to learn how we can make you look good with your distribution, how you can analyze more agency or carrier books more quickly and without having to massage the data first.

Who likes rekeying data? Part II of II

Posted by Mason Power - September 15th, 2009 at 09:09:16 am

Further to the earlier post about how our BookSmart solution enables more than bulk uploading of insurance policies from agency management systems to carrier back-end systems, here are some other use cases to consider when determining if AgencyPort can help you:

1. For marketing departments use us for agent analytics. Carriers can combine data from various back-office systems (e.g. policy administration and claim systems) along with point of sale systems (e.g. Agent Portals) in order to measure agent productivity, book of business profitability, etc. Have these run automatically and sent internally and/or to your agent force so they know where they stand with you. Also, use BookSmart to analyze the quality of an agents book of business before appointing them.
2. Market sizing - upload current submission activity from point of sale systems and analyze the potential market for new products. Given your current appetite, do your auto insurance policyholders offer an upsell opportunity (e.g. homeowners)? The creation of data that is complete, accurate and normalized is difficult, BookSmart makes it manageable. You can even use third-party data vendors (e.g. Marketstance) to measure the market you don’t currently see. Focus on measuring the addressable market for your product(s) and not on collecting good data.
3. “What if” scenarios - actuaries can take advantage of a complete and accurate data set for testing coverage and pricing models against various forms of loss factors. Apply pricing to the book using our rules built in our XARC engine or connect to any rating engine. BookSmart has a “Copy Book” feature so you can create many instances of the same book without impacting downstream systems.

BookSmart is constantly evolving so look for updates such as offering “BookSmart as a Service” for smaller carriers looking to have books posted in the cloud. Let us know if you have other uses or want to learn more.

Who likes rekeying data? Part I of II

Posted by Mason Power - September 14th, 2009 at 11:09:09 am

Especially when you’re dealing with hundreds or thousands of records, this manual effort is unacceptable. That’s why for insurance book rolling, bulk uploading of policy data from agency management systems to carrier policy administration systems is a killer application.

Vertafore’s AMS 360 Online, AfW and Sagitta agency management systems all offer bulk export for book rolling. AgencyPort’s BookSmart integrates these various feed formats and data from various spreadsheet formats into one normalized data stream. BookSmart then corrects and validates the data and allows for rich analysis of risk in aggregate or policy-by-policy before exporting the clean data for downstream insurance carrier systems.

Our comprehensive and complete data model conforms to industry standards and integrates smoothly with policy administration and other back-office systems as well as external parties such as third party data vendors or agency management systems. Once the Transaction Definition File is defined, it applies across all of our solutions from Agent Portals to bridging from agency management systems.

But while this is one killer application of BookSmart, we offer much more value to carriers and these two posts list other applications of the software we sell to carriers. In today’s post we list a few and will finish the list in a Part II. The solutions we offer are of interest to the marketing, underwriting, actuarial and/or reinsurance departments.

1. Are you migrating to a new back-office system? For example, if you are merging into a new insurance policy administration system, the requirements for data conversion pose many challenges. You will find bad data in your legacy system and you will find data that the new system needs that is not present in the legacy system. We help by automatically correcting or bumping and slotting of this data or allow for manual fixing by policy or in bulk. Cut down on the cost of your system migration by aggregating policy data, you will find our data correction and validation is the most robust on the market. Because it works so well at the point of sale, you can rest assured it will be agile and reliable enough to work for system migrations.
2. Do you have many policy administration systems? Perhaps you have acquired new subsidiaries and want to aggregate your total risk. Our aggregation service delivers accurate and complete information for use in either our reporting analytics or by interface with third party aggregation services (e.g. Open Xposure by Sword Intech). Our solution is also well-suited for preparing bordereau reports for ceding risks to reinsurers.
3. Do you need to anticipate and send non-renewal notifications? Use BookSmart to assess large quantities of in-force policies to identify those that do not meet renewal criteria. Generate a list of these policies so that non-renewal notices can be sent before deadlines. Also filter for those that can be automatically renewed and those that need to be referred to an underwriter. Integration is available with third-party data providers (e.g. MVR or credit bureaus) so that current and accurate information can be used to determine renewal eligibility.

Look for more ideas in Part II or contact us for more information about your needs.

Are you BookSmart?

Posted by Mason Power - June 16th, 2009 at 09:06:56 am

Quiz for you: What was the #1 product request from large property & casualty carriers at last week’s ACORD mini-conference?

If you guessed “Commercial Lines Book Roll” you are an insurance technology savant.

I joined AgencyPort last week (Who is this Mason Power clown anyway? – see here for a bio) and noticed a ton of momentum around processing book rolls online.

Book rolling (search for more info here) occurs when an agent moves their book from one carrier to another, or a carrier is bought by another insurance company or any number of situations when a large quantity of risk data needs to be provided to a new carrier upon each policy renewal.

Instead of manual re-keying policy data manually, some carriers are using technology to do this online in a fraction of the time. Adopting this technology saves enormous amounts of money, improves data quality and provides a better way to spot undesirable risks.

With even hundreds of records per month (thousands per month is more common), the savings to the carrier can be in the tens of thousands of dollars in year one. Four personal lines carriers are live with AgencyPort’s BookSmart product with at least as many personal lines insurance companies in the pipeline. Demand is high to deliver more product to the market.

Today we digested this demand from several commercial lines carriers and decided on a product roadmap that delivers further enhancements and makes commercial lines book rolling ready for demonstration in BookSmart soon. If you want to be part of the launch of commercial lines book rolling with AgencyPort, contact your AgencyPort rep or e-mail us at sales@agencyport.com.