The challenges involved with operating a small insurance company may pale against those of giant, tier-one insurers—unless, of course, you have to operate one of those small insurers with a staff of a dozen employees and confidence in the business partners you selected are up to the challenge.

The Barnstable is a small, niche personal property insurer located on Cape Cod, Massachusetts. The carrier writes only Cape Cod property and has approximately 17,000 policyholders. The carrier offers its product through an independent agent force that numbers 21 agencies.

“Our goal as a business is to be a high value service provider to our stakeholders,” says John DeMello, president and CEO of The Barnstable. By stakeholders, he means both the agents and the policyholders.

“We are focused on providing those stakeholders with a high quality product and backing it up with outstanding service,” he says.

DeMello believes The Barnstable is unusual because of the concentration of its policies in one area. He believes operating in one community—even one located near the ocean—is a positive aspect for the company and looks at the company's size and proximity to its insureds as being an advantage.

The Barnstable has only 12 employees, which means each member of the staff plays an important role in the business, according to DeMello.

“Our employees tend to wear a lot of hats and have a wide breadth of responsibilities when you compare their roles to our counterparts with bigger companies,” he says. “Our key vendors also play a large role in our business. They are looked at as business partners, which is one of the reasons why we chose IDP for our software.”

When it comes to technology, DeMello doesn't believe The Barnstable needs the latest, greatest piece of software.

“That's not to suggest IDP doesn't have great technology, but that's just not our focus in terms of running the business,” he says. “We're all about providing great value and service to our agents. We are easy to do business with, but they select us because of how we do the small stuff. We're dialed into turning problems into opportunities and listening to our stakeholders. We don't have multiple layers between those dealing with our customers and the ultimate decision making.”

That's where IDP comes in, according to DeMello. Over the last five years, the vendor has assisted The Barnstable build out an agency portal that allows the carrier's agents to do basic functions such as policy and billing inquiry. As part of IDP's InsuraSphere AgentXpress portal, The Barnstable also extends service opportunities to policyholders to conduct billing inquiry and status, view account, and process payments on demand.

“IDP helped integrate the portal with our back-end policy and billing systems through the use of web services,” says DeMello. “We also have a document management system from Vertafore that we use to warehouse our customer accounts and claim files. IDP has been a big help with that by feeding the document management system daily with output from the core system. That gives our customers access to their documents through the portal.”

In 2012, IDP helped The Barnstable to develop a mortgage billing function and to mail policies to mortgagees, according to DeMello.

“IDP automated that process to send out the bills electronically and make us more efficient,” he says. “It allows us to send dec-page information to the mortgagees. IDP was able to understand our needs and developed a nice solution for us. They were not an impediment; they helped make it happen.”

DeMello has a goal of taking the non-value added services that don't improve The Barnstable's customer relationship and either outsource them or eliminate them.

“With just 12 employees we are challenged to manage 17,000 policies,” he says. “Historically we've handled the printing for the dec pages and are still doing it. We have to collate them and mail them out in a batch process every day. We ask our independent agents to mail them out to the 17,000 policyholders. It's an inefficient and costly process.”

The Barnstable has since found a business partner to take on the printing and mailing to the policyholders through an electronic print stream from the IDP system.

Also in 2012, The Barnstable entered the excess and surplus line market by forming a wholly-owned subsidiary company. Because the insurer has such concentration on Cape Cod, DeMello explains they could not afford to grow their exposure and book of business significantly. At the same time, he explains, the independent agents need as much capacity as The Barnstable can afford to give them.

“By forming an E&S broker and getting a Lloyd's of London cover-holder appointment, we were able to bring more capital to our independent agents so they can write more business,” he says. “There is a whole set of rules and regulatory requirements as well as reporting requirements back to Lloyds. IDP did a great job of understanding those business requirements and adapting their systems to the new processes.

The Barnstable outsources to IDP its core business functions, including the hosting of systems and software. The carrier also relies on third-party independent claims adjusters.

“Because of our size, we outsource all the systems and software and we don't want to have those systems internally,” says DeMello. “One of our strategies is to be sure none of our mission-critical systems is run internally. To have the entire InsuraSphere suite of products to run our business was another key. We wanted to avoid separate policy, billing, and claims systems from separate vendors. IDP was able to provide the entire suite of software solutions to run our business. That's important, particularly for a small company. We have one point of contact for any software.”

Special Reports /

Case Study: Niche Property Insurer, Solution Provider Keep the Business Rolling

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