While I was attending the ASCnet TENCon in Kansas City earlier thismonth, CIAB made big news by announcing a partnership with LexisNexis tobuild a Web-based insurance exchange for independentproducers.

|

The project, which goes into testing next summer, isdesigned to make interface easier between insurers and producers– asubject near and dear to the heart of Jeff Yates, the head ofIIABA's ACT group.

Yates believes any industry interest in promoting moreefficient Web-based communication is a good thing, especially whenit's targeting medium-to-large commercial lines business and isbeing promoted by a group with the big-broker clout of theCouncil.

However, he cautioned, “let's not lose sight of the toolswe already have” in the ongoing quest for informationsharing–specifically, the real time initiative that he and manyothers have been tirelessly promoting for years. (Nocoincidence that ASCnet's new chair is Lisa Parry Becker, whosepassion about real time is well documented inthe industry.)

The CIAB arrangement could facilitate more onlinecollaboration between brokers, carriers and underwriters and thesharing of unstructured data such as loss runs and financialreports. “Otherwise, brokers and/or carriers will set up their owncollaboration sites for this purpose,” Yates said.He added it will be interesting to see how willing brokers andcarriers are to embrace another aspect of the CIAB model, wheremarket-related trends and information are consolidated and shared,because of the fear of compromising their competitive advantagerooted in their firm's unique market intelligence.Yates is convinced that no matter what happens with theCouncil project, “real time will remain the core transaction, evenin the larger commercial space.” Real-time technology, althoughusually equated with smaller business, is extremely viable in thelarge commercial business arena; some carriers are already usingreal time to import midsized to larger commercial linesdata into carrier systems, Yates noted. Real-time tools arestarting to be used for moving unstructured data such as loss runsand financial reports between brokers and carriers as well.“And agents are starting to move beyond using commercial linesdownload for just small commercial business to using it for themore standard larger commercial policies such as workers' comp,commercial auto and umbrella,” Yates said. “There is a big pushwithin the industry to improve the amount and quality of datadownloaded.”

Do you think the CIAB insurance exchange will take hold in theindustry?