Portals are no longer simply nice-to-have for insurance carriers. According to Matthew Josefowicz, a senior analyst with Celent, By 2005, the majority of U.S. insurers will offer agent and policyholder Web portals for new business, self-service, field force management and document distribution.
Today, nearly all carriers have portals of varying functional degrees. And while portals have picked up momentum in insurance over the last two or three years with investments made in both customer-facing and agent-facing portals, many of these investments have been deemed unsuccessful for three primary reasons:
Limited scope of functionality with only narrow windows to a single back-end system versus the ability to connect with multiple back-end systems in an integrated business process;
Limited adoption due to absence of functionality most relevant to users, and available on a timely basis, for example agent/broker portals lacking new business application functionality;
Overly costly traditional development and implementation approaches which have been slow to implement and have discouraged adoption.
Research confirms portals have become the user interface of choice for customers and partners. Insurance customers indicate improved efficiencies and higher customer/channel partner retention are the primary drivers for portals as Internet users demand convenience and efficiency. Employers are demanding easy group insurance portals that reduce the burden on plan administrators and value self-service over price.
In the past, carriers responded to competitive pressures by investing tactically, racing to get on the Web rather than examining the opportunity strategically from a long-term viewpoint. As a result, the practical solution for modern portal investments is to extend rather than replace initial portal deployments.
Research indicates significant adoption of J2EE Application Servers, like IBM WebSphere, bring portal functionality that makes it an ideal starting point for portal development. That, together with insurance-specific portal extension applications, offering insurance transaction functionality like enrollment, new business application processing and document delivery can be a winning combination offering a scalable platform combined with deep insurance business functionality for rapid time to market and the quick realization of ROI.
Solutions designed to extend portals will also deploy technologies like Web Services and XML for data integration and abstracted data models that can link to previous portal efforts as well as additional back-end systems masking that complexity from business and end users developing and using portal application functionality.
Portals provide easy methods of publishing content. But this business user accessible functionality needs to be extended to enable the creation and adaptation of business processes. For example, insurance companies do not want to burden their IT experts with the task of changing customer interview questions or mapping data to compliant forms.
The Year 2003 promises to provide interesting challenges and terrific opportunity for those companies that position themselves for the future by making sound technology decisions that deliver both ROI and customer satisfaction enabling these corporations to build and enhance relationships with customers, distribution channels and the investment community.
InSystems congratulates IASA on its milestone anniversary marking 75 years of service to the insurance industry. As a leading provider of insurance portal solutions and document management software, InSystems has been associated with IASA for about a decade, and, has selected the 2003 IASA conference in June as the forum for announcing the winner of the 2002 Insurance Innovator Award. To apply, visit http://www.insystems.com/innovators/ index.html
For more information, contact InSystems at sales@insystems.com or visit us on the Web at www.insystems.com.
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