Three and a half years ago, Bob Markowitz walked into the office of the company with the most 'legacy' of any carrier in the country-he became vice president of systems for The Philadelphia Contributionship for the Insurance of Houses from Loss by Fire, the oldest insurance company in the U.S.
Ben Franklin, along with other prominent Philadelphians, started the company in 1752, almost 250 years ago. It was a mutual insurance company, owned by the policyholders. There was strict underwriting including a required inspection of every house the company planned to insure. It originally wrote seven-year policies, and started writing 'perpetual' policies in 1810. (With a perpetual policy, a deposit is paid up front, and the building is insured for as long as the policy is in force. If it's ever cancelled, by either the carrier or policyholder, the deposited premium is returned. Claims are paid out of the investment earnings of the initial premium.) Some of the original policies are still in force today.
The original mutual company also still exists, and handles both existing and new perpetual policies. It also acts as a holding company for two 'downstream' stock subsidiaries, The Philadelphia Contributionship Insurance Company (PCIC) and Germantown Insurance Company; the latter is a small company that they acquired a few years back. Operating under the combined name of The Contributionship Companies (which also includes Franklin Agency and Vector Security) but writing on their individual paper, it writes $40 million of homeowners, personal (dwelling) fire, and personal umbrella business in Pennsylvania and New Jersey.
Markowitz has been in insurance company systems departments for 30 years. The first 15 were at Chubb, followed by stints at CIGNA and GNY. He joined The Contributionship in 1998.
Its primary system is a homegrown data repository written on the Pick operating system (The what? See the box.). The company is adding to it; it's put in a relatively complete HP 8100 laser policy printing system, for example. It'll be adding a Web front end, using Coyote (an HTML-to-Pick translator), to allow its agents to access its system for rating and submissions. Its umbrella program had already been written with a Visual Basic front end to Pick, and it will be replacing that with Active Server Pages.
Millbrook's Beacon system provides most reporting and data mining functions such as trends, profit-analysis, and the like. PCIC was involved early, and was one of the original beta sites; it went live, with full implementation, last year.
Markowitz and his team just implemented 1mage ("one-image")-an imaging system written in Universe, a language similar to and easily integrated with Pick. All peripheral policy and claim information such as inspections, signed applications, and adjuster's photos and notes will be seamlessly integrated with the main system.
On the agency side, it's been downloading to AMS's Sagitta and AMS for Windows, as well as TAM and Vision from Applied, since the fall of 1999. It recently added support for DORIS and AMS Prime.
Despite the obligatory joke about having the oldest systems in the country, PCIC actually does a lot of the same things that larger, better funded IT departments do. When a data entry clerk is entering a new submission, the company's systems have gone out and brought back a credit score, an A-Plus report, and maybe MVRs before the data entry is done. When an adjuster goes out, he or she can dial in to use the claims system, and settle the claim on the spot by printing out a check with a simple Word template.
With low-cost and efficient systems like these contributing to good, conservative underwriting, the Contributionship still might be the country's oldest carrier in another 250 years.
Picked Pick?
The Pick operating system is more of a database, and resources are scarce. If you're interested, here are a few:
www.pfinders.com/mvring:
A Pick-related Web ring
www.jes.com/pb:
A Pick BASIC Textbook
comp.databases.pick:
The Pick Usenet newsgroup
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