With the merger of three Farm Bureau insurance companies into Farm Bureau Financial Services back in 2003, the carrier's new management team believed technology would enable the organization to improve the business processes each of the entities had performed in the past. One area the carrier sought to improve was underwriting, and it turned to a rules-based system that would eliminate many of the touches previously required of underwriters.

Farm Bureau identified several benefits it expected to gain with rules-based underwriting, according to Brett Clausen, vice president of the property/casualty companies for Farm Bureau. That list included reduction in workloads, better policy issuance times, improved consistency in underwriting risks, adaptable response to market regulatory changes, expense reduction, allowing underwriters to focus more on exposures that create a higher liability to the company, and the ability to manage and monitor results better.

Farm Bureau's goal was to get the carrier's business rules out of the legacy code so the rules would be more manageable, explains Clausen. "The question we asked ourselves initially was how could we use this tool to achieve speed to market while at the same time underwriting more effectively and efficiently?" he says.