For the most part, my family has stopped asking me about thearticles I'm working on. Apparently they're just not interested inhearing me talk about the latest trends in insurance technology.So, I was surprised to see my son excited to learn that I wasworking on an article about portals. 

"Portals are really powerful," he said. "They give you a lot ofcontrol and take you where you want to go really fast."

With a little questioning on my part, I realized we werespeaking about two different things. You see, my son is a bit of aMinecraft junkie. In the dig-and-build world of Minecraft, portalsare gateways that give players instant access to new areas of thegame that offer additional capabilities and resources.

But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that theMinecraft portal is a perfect analogy for what a modern insuranceportal should be.

First-generation portals offered by insurers limited the way inwhich users could access information and functionality to a single,proprietary interface. "The early portal experiences weremonolithic applications that just happened to run on a webbrowser," says Scott Good, senior director of customer innovationsat E&S carrier Scottsdale Insurance. 

As business users have become untethered from desktops, and asthe world of personal connectivity has evolved to anywhere, anytime, and any device, portals need to be much more than a singleinterface. Modern insurance portals need to be a gateway that givescontrol to users—agents, policyholders, and other stakeholders—andtake them where they want to go, really fast.

Portal Power

A recent "Portal Insight" report from Strategy Meets Action(SMA) detailed how insurance portals must evolve beyond a rigid,limited, tactical application for submission, data capture, andinquiry.

"Insurers should not look at just a single function, such asbuilding a quoting capability on a portal," says SMA founder DebSmallwood. "Carriers should first understand their businessstrategy for channel management, including both sales and service.They need to take a step back before they build a portal anddetermine how they are going to deal with and support prospects,customers, and agents," she adds.

That demands business-IT alignment and planning skills, whichhave traditionally been difficult to come by. "Creating anenterprise portal strategy requires the business and IT to cometogether and create a roadmap, not just for the business to say,'IT, build us a portal,'" Smallwood says. "However, the reality isthat more than a few insurance companies are just starting toconnect their business strategy to their IT strategy."

Scottsdale's portal strategy begins with surveying itscustomers. "What Scottsdale and a lot of our competitors havetraditionally done is deliver portal applications that requirecustomers to log onto a company-branded experience to rate, quote,and issue products," Good says. "But what we heard from ourcustomers was that growth and efficiency in agency operationsrequired utilizing their own management systems to get the sameexperience across multiple carriers."

That led Scottsdale to embark on a mission of creating, inGood's words, a "non-portal portal"—providing portal capabilitiesand connectivity through web services, but eschewing the creationof a Scottsdale-specific user interface.

"Our products are delivered and sold through wholesalers whoalso represent other carriers. So, we embarked on a mission toenhance our portal experience, but also to focus on the non-portalportal—building out the APIs so that agent technology canseamlessly integrate with our back end and access our productswithout logging onto a (Scottsdale-)branded experience," heexplains.

Guardian's portal strategy for its group insurance businessfocuses on the needs of its four key user constituencies: brokers,plan sponsors or their agents, members covered by Guardianinsurance, and provider networks. With 1.3 million users acrossthose groups, the goal of every update, change, and enhancement tothe seven-year-old portal is to avoid disrupting those groups whileenhancing the user experience.

"We're not trying to change the roles of various constituents orforce them to do business a certain way. We're trying to enable theroles that they have," says John Furlong, vice president and CIO ofGroup Insurance at Guardian. To that end, the functionality of theportal is customized to the unique role of the particular useraccessing it.

"Some capabilities are limited to certain roles, while otherfunctions delivered via the portal are designed to be multi-rolefunctions," Furlong says. "We spend a lot of time in strategysessions and with our users trying to envision how each of theirroles work to be sure we are delivering functionality that isappropriate for those roles."

Doing business through a select set of agency partners,Amerisure's primary goal behind its SureConnect portal issupporting that group. "The SureConnect portal is a naturalextension of our ongoing relationship with our partners. It allowsus to extend our service delivery thorough e-commerce," says ShawnO'Rourke, Amerisure vice president and CIO.

However, as the company has developed its enterprise portalstrategy, Amerisure has begun rolling out ways for policyholders tointeract with the company, being careful to involve agents.

"We put a high value on the personal relationships we have withour agents and that they have with their clients—our policyholders.We provide online information and capabilities to policyholdersthat complement what our agents do, and we show agents how thathelps with retention," explains Bernie Smith, agency programsmanager.

Portal Keys

An enterprise portal strategy should keep in mind four keycharacteristics of insurance e-commerce that shape the expectationsof agents and policyholders. First, communication and distributionin today's insurance transaction is no longer limited to a linearprocess, where customers contact the agent, who in turn contactsthe insurer.

"Some insurers are still managing their channels in silos, withdata that is exchanged between customers, agents, and the companyin isolated environments," Smallwood says. She points out thatcommunications today are multifaceted, nonlinear, andunpredictable, where people communicate through various types ofdevices and often reach out to many people at once.

"There is a need for the portal to support nonlinearcommunication and enable collaboration," Smallwood says. "Thecollaboration could be as basic as a status update: 'We receivedyour submission and it's in underwriting.' It could be providingcommunication in some way other than email—using a vehicle liketext or chat. It might be alerting users in real time that theydidn't input all the information needed or that there is anunderwriting question around what they have entered. It could beproviding a shared collaboration environment to make it easier todo things like writing proposals on very largerisks." 

The Guardian Anytime portal provides nonlinear capability acrossseveral functions and lines of benefit insurance. For instance,enrollment can be done through the traditional process, withGuardian staff entering it into the company's backendadministration systems. Members, third-party agents, andpolicyholders can use Guardian Anytime, which integrates with thosesystems. And, Guardian is currently introducing web services thatallow TPAs to use their own management systems to processenrollment and update the information seamlessly in Guardian'sportal. 

"Different insurance relationships will come up where peoplewill want to combine things cross-carrier and cross-plan," saysFurlong. "We want to be sure the service experience iscontinuous."

The second expectation that needs to be met by a moderninsurance portal is that access can happen anytime, anywhere, andusing any medium users select.

"Where insurers are challenged is creating a seamless experienceacross the web, mobile device, tablet, or phone," Smallwood says.She also points out that the portal must support a wide variety ofcommunication modes that include email, mail, paper, voice,texting, chat, and face-to-face.

Insurers are trying to determine the best way to provide thosemulti-platform capabilities. "Some are building mobile appsthemselves. Some are looking to their policy administration vendorsto pick up the ball," says Smallwood. "They're all trying to findways to avoid having multiple applications replicating the samefunctionality on different platforms."

Guardian is doing its own mobile development. "If I could buyit, I would," Furlong says. "We're pushing our [portal] experiencesout to the mobile world—phone, tablet, and so on."

Guardian's first capability, launched in late 2012, allowedmembers to find a network provider and leveraged the GPS locationcapabilities of mobile devices. In March 2013, the companyintroduced electronic ID cards.

"We've had online ID cards for a while, but pushing those tomobile allows the device to be used like a wallet," saysFurlong.

Scottsdale has worked over the past three years to extend itsexisting portal, in place since 2007, to deliver multi-platformcapabilities that align with the company's enterprise portalstrategy.

"Our portal has been consistently ranked as extraordinarily easyto use. Users could rate and issue the full policy, do endorsementsand cancellations, even out of sequence—the full lifecycle. But, itwas launched with the idea of a single user experience based on aweb browser access. Today, we are working to take that verytraditional portal experience and move it to a more robust serviceexperience," Good says.

Scottsdale is currently working to build web services exposingfunctionality that can ultimately be accessed by mobile devices."We're putting our effort into the infrastructure of using webservices to allow our trading partners to develop mobile servicesthat are customized to what they want, rather than our view," saysGood.

Portal Connectivity

The third reality an enterprise portal strategy must reflect itsusers' expectation that portals provide or complement directconnectivity to agency management systems, comparative raters, andother e-commerce platforms. 

"Although the industry is still in the early stages ofintegration, many companies now have platforms that can quickly andeasily plug into new comparative raters, agency management systems,and so on, with the interfaces and integration to the back endrating and administration systems already in place," Smallwood says.

"Agents want to manage their destiny," Good says. "If they areputting data into a carrier system that they can't easily pull intotheir management system, they can't easily use that information tosee how their agency is performing. Agents have told us we need tohelp them get that data back into their own systems, which meansthey are saying they want the agency management system to be theheart and soul of their agency."

"About 95 percent of ours agents use an agency managementsystem," O'Rourke says. "We provide content in the portal thatagents can take back into their management system, and we have anongoing dialog with our agents about further integration." All ofSureConnect's capabilities are also delivered through Amerisure'sinternal portal for employees as well as select capabilities on itspublic website.

SureConnect's 2009 launch was the result of an agile developmentinitiative in lieu of the Amerisure's traditional waterfallapproach. "That [agile] approach allowed a lot of creativity andspeed-to-market," Smith says. "We couldn't afford a long, drawn outdevelopment process—we risked falling behind the industry if wedid."

The portal initially provided access to claims information, andAmerisure has continued to add functionality over time. "We're at apoint where we have represented on SureConnect much of the businessfunctionality of an insurance company—claims, loss controlinformation, billing documents—most of what we do is representedthere one way or another," O'Rourke says.

Amerisure reports that all of its agents use SureConnect to somedegree, along with a "significant" number of policyholders."Policyholders typically access claims information, loss controltraining, or other educational collateral," Smith says. "The numberof policyholders on the system is growing and continues to grow ata rapid rate, and SureConnect is becoming a part of the salesprocess for many agencies, either in retaining existing accounts orsecuring new business opportunities." 

Through conversations with its agents, Scottsdale recognized theneed to support agent technology.

"They were asking for more and more tweaks to the user interfaceof the existing portal, and we got to the point where we realizedwe couldn't make a single interface fit for everyone. There was aneed to expose service capabilities they could connect to," Goodexplains.

The first service Scottsdale delivered was what Goodcharacterizes as a "simplistic" approach to rating. That wasclosely followed by sample application sets that agents couldconfigure, modify, and embed into their own system. The company iscurrently deploying a claims administration solution that willallow Scottsdale to provide claim information to the portal via webservice APIs.

"We haven't slayed all the capabilities, and there are certainareas we may never get to because there just isn't a demand toprovide it via a web service, such as agency P&L reporting andsimilar reporting functionality," Good says. "We are allowing ouragents to lead the effort, identifying the most repetitive tasks wecan target for efficiency gains, rather than functions that simplyaren't used that often." 

Portal connectivity requires standards, which are more mature instandard P&C than in other lines.

"Industry standards have been slow to evolve, so we have to workwith multiple counterparties to make sure things are acceptable,"says Furlong. "For instance, we developed our web services afterconsultations with multiple TPAs. We start with industry standardswhere we can, and look to reach consensus with partners where wecan't." 

"We've seen a rapid movement in the [nonstandard lines] space ofcarriers offering up APIs," Good says. "We've taken a leadershiprole, working with ACORD to deliver up web service standards tomake messages consistent across carriers, and working with a lot ofvendors who are building out capabilities to pull in rates andinformation from multiple carriers."

Continued Capability

Lastly, the portal experience must provide more thaninformation. "Inquiry is a bare minimum for self-service—being ableto look at policy information, print it, get an ID card," Smallwoodsays. "Insurers really need to find a way to deliver capabilitiesthat extend beyond that and serve multiple purposes for multipleaudiences."

"When it comes to the transaction of quoting and selling apolicy, we've been there for a while," Good says. "However, wefound it wasn't enough just to deliver rates."

Instead, agents wanted information on the underlying processthat went into to the quote. "They wanted to know what underwritinginformation was being considered, what classifications arerestricted or prohibited, and other rules around the risk theyweren't aware of," Good says.

At the beginning of this year, Scottsdale launched anenhancement that provided agents additional detail on ratecalculation. "We deliver cross references to classificationinformation, state and territory codes, underwriting rules, and soon," Good says. "We don't just deliver the pure rates, we deliver afull catalog that can be delivered via web services."

That type of drill-down is the basis for effectivecollaboration. "We're starting to see the next generation ofportals deliver more sophisticated collaboration capabilitiesbetween insurers and portal users," Smallwood says. "The portalshould provide the ability to share information between agents andinsurers in real-time and provide customers a personalizedexperience that reflects their full relationship with acompany."  

Guardian has focused on providing more power to individualmembers over plan management. "From the beginning, the portal wasboth informational and transactional, but we have moved more andmore into transactional capabilities," says Furlong. 

The first major milestone was providing online enrollmentcapability for plan sponsors and TPAs. That capability was laterprovided to members as well.

Recently added functionality includes the aforementioned mobilephone capabilities, additional billing capabilities for plansponsors to update online billing information related toself-administered plans, and adding more worksite benefit products.The latest functionality to be introduced was the ability torequest changes online.

"We're also continuing to work on the user experience so thatit's more complete," Furlong says. "We already provide a lot ofinformation to users, but we haven't taken 100 percent of theinformation we have and put it into a single 'file cabinet' that isan electronic record of everything a member has ever done with us.We'd like to get to that point." 

Guardian measures the impact of the portal in many differentways: pure usage statistics; how many transactions or enrollmentsare initiated via the portal, how many service requests arecompleted; and others. One of the biggest areas of impact has beenautomating several eligibility transactions for straight-throughprocessing, which has increased the percentage of thosetransactions going through the portal in real time from 50 to 70percent. 

Portal Progression

Smallwood believes that portals will continue to be an area ofinvestment for insurers.

"As both agents and policyholders expect faster and fasterresponse times and more complete information, insurers are going tobe pressured to expand their portal capabilities" shesays. 

"We continue to invest every year in additional portalcapabilities, and I don't see that investment decreasing," Furlongsays. "It's part of the way we do business and the way we reach outto our clients, and we will continue to enhance all those roles aswe go forward."

"Market leaders are getting good at providing capabilities basedon an enterprise strategy, and others are getting there," Smallwoodadds. "Their capabilities will all grow along with the increasingsophistication of portals in the marketplace."