ISCS, a leading provider of policy administration systems forproperty/casualty insurers, has announced its new Web 2.0direct-to-consumer personal auto policy quoting, purchase, andissuance product as an addition to the standard feature set ofSurePower Innovation, the company's insurance automationsolution.

Property/casualty insurers need to automate critical businessprocesses, including policy administration, underwriting, andbilling, to achieve and maintain a competitive advantage.Implementing self-service capabilities, including developments suchas SurePower Innovation's new DTC portal, is a primary wayinsurance companies can take advantage of technology to build abetter rapport with customers.

ISCS's DTC portal enables insurance carriers and MGAs to rollout quickly Web applications for DTC insurance quoting andpurchasing; automate online quoting, sales, and consumerself-service; and utilize analytics.

ISCS's development process includes testing with actual targetcustomers in their home settings and with focus groups. This methodoptimizes the logical default choices, number of defaults for theform fields, and question order and grouping and ensures consumerunderstanding of form label language.

"Without compromising security, we used modern, user-friendlyWeb 2.0 techniques for this product, writing it in Adobe Flexcoupled with cloud computing services for address verification, VINlook-up, mapping, and best agent selection," says Myron Meier, vicepresident of product development for ISCS. "This structure isinherently ready for future Web services the tech industry willdevelop. Optionally, the ability to deploy the product using cloudcomputing capacity provides almost instant scalability tocost-effectively match variable customer traffic without addingmore internal IT infrastructure that will sit idle much of thetime."