Anne Tarryk, Middlesex Mutual
Anne Tarryk is the top tech at Middlesex Mutual Assurance Company, a 165-year old carrier in Middletown, Conn-a small town about a half-hour south of Hartford, in a beautiful home office (the tallest building in town) with an antique, horse-drawn, hand-operated fire pumper in the lobby. I expected to find a typical New England mutual, and a senior IT executive with a standard title like CIO or vice president of information technology. Wrong on both counts.
Tarryk's title is "vice president of distributed technologies." Not the typical description for the senior IT executive, but it turns out that Middlesex isn't your typical New England mutual, either.
Middlesex is an $80 million carrier, writing predominantly personal lines in four states (Connecticut, Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont) and just entering New York. It does it all out of its home office and two small branches. It currently has about three hundred agents, a number that's growing as it expands into New York. It's also moving into niche markets, with products like its innovative antique homeowners policy, called the Restorationist.
A few years ago, Middlesex got together with three other companies: Country Companies of Bloomington, Ill.; MSI, near Minneapolis; and Salem, Mass.-based Holyoke Mutual. The plan was to increase their purchasing power, lower expenses, and improve their bottom lines. As a result, the mainframe operations have all been combined into the Country Companies' facility in Illinois. The large functions-policy processing, stat reporting, claims, those kinds of things-are all centered in Illinois, running on a Freedom Group (Fiserv) system.
Tarryk came up through the vendor ranks, with stints at Cisgem and then AMS, before joining Middlesex. She heads an amazingly small staff of 14, made up of a mix of business analysts, programmers, and network engineers. They're still responsible for their LANs and WAN, and Middlesex-specific areas such as agency-company interface (mostly download, with some upload). In addition, they have another eight alliance 'consultants' assigned to them for their mainframe needs.
Because Tarryk's responsibilities are to run the functions that are distributed to their New England operations, it turns out that her unusual job title actually describes her position exactly.
Michael J. Kirrene, Republic Indemnity Company of America
Mike Kirrene is senior vice president and chief information officer of Encino, California-based Republic Indemnity. This Republic-unrelated to Republic Insurance, Texas, or Old Republic, Illinois-is part of the American Financial Group, best known for its Great American Insurance subsidiary. Technically, Great American and Republic Indemnity are sister companies; AFG also owns other insurance companies.
Republic exclusively writes workers' compensation insurance. Almost 75 percent of its $200-million-per-year writings are in California, a notoriously tough marketplace for that line of business. The balance is mostly in Nevada and Arizona, with a smattering in other western states. Republic is very conservative, which can be a double-edged sword. On one hand, it's one of only two California workers' comp carriers with an A rating; on the other, it maintains that rating by not underpricing its business, putting the company at a disadvantage when competing with carriers that do.
Kirrene has been at Republic for five years, with previous stints at Balboa Life & Casualty and Mission Insurance. He's also the developer of PlanXpert 4.1 (www.planxpert.com), an automated set of IT project planning tools.
Republic has been an IBM mid-range computer shop for the last 15 years, and now uses a homegrown AS400 back-end system. Two years ago, however, that system was front-ended with green-screen terminals. It now has a fully deployed user PC environment with Windows, Lotus Notes, and Web browsers.
Republic's most recent big project involves the rollout of its new Exigen imaging system. The solution is being introduced first in the 'bill-pay' arena-a department critical to the day-to-day operation of a worker's comp business. Much like health insurance, workers' comp has a high premium percentage payout and a high number of payees. Republic's implementation is not only heavily integrated within and among its internal systems; the company is also integrating Exigen with its third-party vendor partners' systems. They provide services such as medical cost verification, claims adjudication, subrogation, and more.
Republic also developed an extranet-an HTML-based transactional site for agents to submit business electronically. Some business fits all the guidelines and is handled programmatically; other types are declined. For the business that is shunted to an underwriter for manual review, agents are given a promise of priority handling and a 48-hour turnaround guarantee.
The agents say they like it, but the usage isn't as high as they think it should be. Republic will figure it out, though. Kirrene is actually going out on agency calls with the marketing staff to talk to agents about the changes they need, and to encourage them to do more business electronically.
Jane Koppenheffer, CPCU, AAM, ARP, Are; Penn National
Threshers are inherently dangerous machines. In 1920, when a group of Pennsylvanians couldn't get workmen's compensation coverage-as it was called back then-they got together and formed Pennsylvania Threshermens' & Farmers' Mutual Casualty Insurance Company. Today, that company has evolved into Penn National (Pennsylvania National Mutual Casualty Insurance Company-still a mouthful), and Jane Koppenheffer is its CIO.
Penn National is a $450 million premium carrier operating in nine states, with approximately 1,100 independent agencies serviced through the Harrisburg home office and five offices. The business consists of about 60 percent commercial lines, and growing.
Koppenheffer came up from the underwriting side of the business. She's spent all of her 21-year insurance career with Penn National, holding various underwriting and marketing positions, including branch manager. After 12 years as liaison between the underwriting department and IT, she was invited to take over the CIO position.
PennConnect is the company's largest project. Started in 2000 and scheduled for completion in 2004, it electronically connects the company's agents to various internal systems. Penn recently went live with the first phase, connecting agents in Pennsylvania and North Carolina-its largest two states. Agents can log on to get live, real-time quotes for BOP, commercial auto, workers' comp, and CPP (property, CGL, crime, inland marine). More lines will follow. Agents who use IVANS's Transformation Station can send data electronically from their agency management system and have it pre-filled in PennConnect. Agencies have claims and billing inquiry now, and the system is going to allow for customer online billing inquiry in a future phase. Agencies have claims and billing inquiry.
On the back end, Penn has an old PMSC (CSC) system, Series 2, with version 6 for personal lines and commercial auto, and version 7 for other commercial lines. The company didn't want to try replacing it all at once, considering the number of systems it feeds. So it's doing it incrementally. The PennConnect project, for example, actually uses a newer Allenbrook Phoenix system for policy issuance, and then feeds data back for statistical reporting, claims, general ledger, and other systems.
Penn also recently implemented Advanced Solutions' ImageRight claims imaging system. Koppenheffer describes it as one of the best IT projects ever. The company started in February, went live in June, and has already tasted success. Penn has an SQL server database in the home office, accessed remotely via Citrix, which stores all the images as TIFF files. There is an integrated fax server, allowing transmissions to come in as images. The system is already improving claims service and claims conferencing with both inside and outside adjusters and attorneys.
Penn decided to go with the imaging system first for more immediate returns, and will be implementing Fiserv AIS's Claims WorkStation next year. Interestingly, Penn doesn't generally allow its claims adjusters to print images, minimizing the inclination for people to maintain paper files. If associates really need a paper copy of an image, a supervisor or assistant can print it.
The company set up a certification system for training on the new imaging system for the sake of quality control, and to help identify those with more developed skills to help lead others. They also use Citrix shadowing to see the user's computer remotely, cutting down on training-related travel.
Penn has sure has come a longway since those early threshing machines.
Barry Klein (barry@barryklein.com) is vice president of sales for Superior Access Internet Software, and proprietor of www.ultimateinsurancelinks.com.
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