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.

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.

Aon Benfield, FAConnect & a Rapid Response to a Market Need

Posted by Mason Power - April 30th, 2010 at 08:04:54 am

If you look at this, do you think of the Property insurance claim?

It’s one of many astounding images from the February 27th earthquake in Chile.

The market for property insurance is rapidly responding to the crisis, processing claims on existing policies and looking for new insurance markets to write property coverage in Chile.

Local firms in Chile (admitted carriers, banks, etc.) that source the policies want to have them reinsured. Aon Benfield has arranged a facultative reinsurance facility for up to $50mm per risk for primary, excess or proportional reinsurance with Ascot Underwriting. Firms in Chile can use FAConnect, the Aon Benfield online placement platform, to obtain reinsurance quotes.

We are proud to be able to use AgencyPortal and our delivery team to support Aon Benfield in reacting quickly to the needs of a particular market, in fact, the turnaround to bring the new facility online was just 4 days.

For more information, including Aon Benfield’s announcement that Ascot Underwriting was the first to bind a risk on FAConnect, see Aon Benfield’s press release here.

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.

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.

Lloyd’s Pushes Standardized Bordereau Upload

Posted by Mason Power - October 1st, 2009 at 08:10:39 am

Ahead of the upcoming NAPLSO convention, Lloyd’s has published a brochure promoting the initiative to standardize bordereau uploads for North American property business written by coverholders.

The core problem to be solved is many coverholders having to send risk information to many Lloyd’s syndicates in many formats. Hiscox got fed up and has gone live with its Hiscox Data Exchange which provides an intuitive and intelligent web page for coverholders to have their existing format uploaded to Hiscox. Both the coverholder and Hiscox can then run reports (what has been bound) and analytics (what it means). All of the data is available in XML (ACORD adopted it for its ER3001 format) for integration at Hiscox including RMS/AIR modeling.

A lot has happened around standardizing bordereau formats in the year since the last NAPSLO and we have a lot of momentum with Hiscox and adoption by its coverholders. We are working with others on North American property bordereau and on adding more classes of business. If you want to learn about the underlying solution click here.

Update on the London Market

Posted by Mason Power - September 18th, 2009 at 02:09:07 am

AgencyPort is back in London this week and have found much in the way of progress on many fronts.

We’ve seen brokers looking to buy transaction portals to better serve their clients, brokers looking to provide easier access to London for their U.S. retail clients, London carriers looking to add web access for U.S.-based specialty insurance wholesalers, the market reform body pushing forward to eliminate carrying paper around Lloyd’s (see here), and further progress in automating coverholder bordereau upload (see prior posts on this last initiative here).

In the IT space, market service body Xchanging is close to rolling out a bolt-on solution to its primary broker desktop system that will connect brokers for new business quoting, billing and claims to carriers directly or via the Lloyd’s Exchange. The Lloyd’s Exchange seems to have a lot of momentum and this has created a surge in IT-buying in London.

All of this means that AgencyPort solutions have broader applicability in the Lloyd’s and London market and we hope to have some announcements of new solutions soon.

Momentum for Standardized Bordereau Upload

Posted by Mason Power - August 20th, 2009 at 11:08:14 am

Lloyd’s has been very supportive of improving the quality of data reported by coverholders to managing agents. After all, Lloyd’s wants to measure its collective exposure accurately and with as little delay in reporting as possible.

For example, with hurricane Bill being a big storm and potentially flooding much of the East Coast of North America and possibly hitting land in Nova Scotia, how much property do the Lloyd’s syndicates cover?

Roughly 40% of Lloyd’s coverage comes from local managing general agents with authority to bind risk on behalf of Lloyd’s syndicates and these local underwriters (called “coverholders”) are required to report on a monthly basis. Assuming these reports are sent 15 days after the close of the month, the syndicates might today have some sense of new policies written in July 2009 but no sense of what has been written so far in August. So if you asked a syndicate or Lloyd’s itself how much exposure it has to Bill, it would know most of, but not all of the policies in force.

Compounding the problem for Lloyd’s is the quality of the data it receives from coverholders. Their reporting, called “bordereau”, comes in a wide variety of formats and getting accurate data is a challenge. Syndicates use sophisticated risk modeling services to measure its exposure and our CoverIQ product is in use today by Hiscox to gather data from many coverholders in many formats and normalize the data for use in RMS models.

ACORD adopted our data structure developed with Hiscox as its binder standard and last week AIR announced it will accept data in this format. So our CoverIQ is now useful to all syndicates whether they use RMS or AIR and today we’re talking with Sword Intech about their Open Xposure product.

Carl Philips of Lloyd’s authored a good blog post yesterday restating Lloyd’s intent to make this standard widely adopted among its syndicates and the brokers and coverholders who source their US property business. We’re in London in 2 weeks to discuss the solution with more syndicates, let us know if you’d like to talk about getting quality bordereau data in a timely fashion.