Insight: A Sword Insurance Blog

Onwards FAConnect

Posted by Mason Power - May 13th, 2010 at 01:05:31 pm

Today there are two important developments on FAConnect to relate:

First, Aon Benfield announced that US Terrorism is the latest reinsurance facility live on FAConnect, Aon Benfield’’s facultative reinsurance placement platform built on our AgencyPortal framework.

Coming on the heels of Aon Benfield launching a Chilean earthquake property facility with Ascot, Aon Benfield announced that its clients can place up to $250m in facultative US Terrorism coverage via pre-negotiated facilities with Lloyd’s syndicates with Ascot the lead and Amlin, Beazley and Liberty following Ascot.

AgencyPortal’s tools-based configuration and the experienced teams from both AgencyPort and Aon Benfield are taking facility agreements online very rapidly allowing Aon Benfield to address pressing facultative reinsurance market needs.

Second, FAConnect now supports syndicated placement of facultative reinsurance. Where pre-negotiatied facilities for a particular coverage provide for a reinsurance carrier to act as lead and one or many other carriers to act as follower, FAConnect enables the same fast online binding as for facilities with one cedant trading with one reinsurer. The cedant can choose from their available facilities and adjust the ratio of coverage between the lead and the followers and then bind the risk. Cedants and Aon Benfield brokers acting online on behalf of cedants (there are thousands of cedants in FAConnect already) may then immediately view bordereaux reports for each carrier in the transaction.

Both the online trading capabilities and the number of facilities and trading partners available in FAConnect continue to grow at a fast pace.

Program and Specialty Lines Webinar

Posted by Michael Albert - March 25th, 2010 at 07:03:58 pm

For anyone who didn’t have a chance to catch it live, here’s a recording of the program and specialty lines automation webinar we held this afternoon.

AgencyPort adds new client: Aon Benfield

Posted by Mason Power - January 28th, 2010 at 01:01:30 pm

We’re pleased to announce that we’ve signed with Aon Benfield. Our press release is here.

Yesterday Aon announced that they’ve launched a transaction portal for facultative reinsurance. See their press release here. There’s lots of press coverage here.

The business need was to enable Aon Benfield to serve ceding insurance carriers for smaller facultative placements where the cost of placing these transactions in person was prohibitive. Aon Benfield adopted AgencyPortal to drive down placement costs and allow these cedants to use Aon’s advisory services and Aon’s help to tap into a complex marketplace.

The business requirement for a portal was to bring placement straight to the desktop of these cedants – Aon’s clients and to give them an easy-to-use interface where a facultative reinsurance placement could be completed in 5 minutes or less. Aon arranges for multiple reinsurers to provide pre-negotiated facilities for cedants to choose from.

To demonstrate AgencyPort’s ability to get to market quickly, we built a Proof of Concept in a few weeks after which Aon announced the platform in September at the Monte Carlo Rendezvous. The production portal is called FAConnect and it went live this week.

The platform is built entirely on our AgencyPortal application framework and the deal is significant for AgencyPort’s market position for reasons including:

-It further demonstrates our capabilities for rapid deployment
-It is for a new type of transaction – facility or automatic placement and our first implementation in the reinsurance market
-It is for specialty lines of business for which we didn’t have templates ready; it’s the first large-scale use of our ToolKit to build new content and it went much more quickly than in the days before ToolKit
-It’s our first broker client
-It is a global product and the future build-out will be in multi-currency, multi-region, multi-language

For further information please get in touch.

Inside the head of the buyer of AgencyPort solutions

Posted by Mason Power - October 8th, 2009 at 08:10:43 am

When things go wrong we tend to spend a lot of time on lessons learned. But when things go well, we are too busy patting ourselves on the back to study what worked so that we can repeat it. One of the sessions at last week’s User Conference was a welcome exception to this rule.

Thanks to one of our newer customers, attendees at this year’s AgencyPort User Conference were treated to a thorough explanation of how a large firm pulled the trigger to bring in AgencyPort to help with Program Automation. The following excerpts from their session.

The first slide shows the project goals:

I’m reminded of our post last week about building a business use case for automating new business using AgencyPort. Just as we discussed in that post, if you look at the benefit drivers above, none of these are easily measurable in hard dollars, instead the case was likely made by fear – it’s a big market and our technology holds us back from being competitive.

Then during the 60-minute session, the client showed a matrix of features that were required of the first phase of the project:

Given the number of internal systems to which this transaction portal needed to be integrated, it looks neat and tidy on one slide, but it’s a big project. But, as revealed in the first slide, it is architected to be leveragable for use by other product s and in different areas (e.g. different size client, etc.)

Finally, the client showed a decision matrix showing the criteria it used to evaluate vendors and ultimately choose AgencyPort:

Of all of these, the ACORD XML architecture was listed as the most significant and since AgencyPort is built on top of the ACORD standards, we were a terrific fit. Thank you to our client for sharing this with other clients and prospects at User Conference. It’s not surprising that most attendees vote client spotlight sessions like this one as the most important at our User Conference (behind the opening session video that is…)

Let us know if we can help you with similar solutions to automate your program business.