News, Insights, Innovations

ONLINE SALES
Safeco Enhances Agents E-S-P
Safeco Business Insurance has expanded its online sales platform, known as E-S-P, to make it faster and easier for agents to sell commercial auto insurance to small businesses. The platform allows agents to quote, bind, and issue commercial auto policies online. The 5,400 agents representing Safeco Business Insurance sell or renew nearly 100,000 commercial auto policies every year.

With E-S-P, we can cut the time it takes to quote commercial auto policies, says Jeanne Lind, director of automation for Safeco Business Insurance, and with real-time underwriting, we can issue a policy instantly. In most cases, agents literally can issue their auto policies while theyre on the phone with a client. Its part of Safecos strategy to reduce the time, cost, and complexity of selling and servicing small and medium-sized business accounts.

E-S-P technology automatically pre-fills common customer information fields based on vehicle identification numbers, and the system adjusts its questions according to the data entered. Agents can choose to enter a quick estimate to get a ballpark price without having to enter detailed driver and vehicle information.

The E-S-P platform is accessible at www.safecoplaza.com/esp for both business owner policies (BOP) and commercial auto risks. Initially, agents will be able to use the system to sell Safecos most popular commercial auto policiesnonfleet policies for vehicles garaged in a single state. Safeco accepts both monoline commercial auto policies and policies written along with a Safeco BOP or commercial multiperil (CMP) package.

Later this year and in 2004, Safeco will enable agents to use E-S-P to sell workers compensation policies, CMP package products, and other commercial auto policies, including fleet vehicles, multistate garaging locations, and farm vehicles.

WEB RESOURCE
JFP Producers Get New Site
Jefferson Pilot Financial has introduced My JPF, an online business resource available to Jefferson Pilot Financials licensed agents and registered representatives. The site contains more than 55 business applications and 7,000-plus pages of content. My JPF provides producers and registered representatives support for every phase of the sales cycle, from marketing, training and education, advanced sales support and research to product detail, processing of business, compensation detail and servicing of clients.

Warren May, executive vice president-marketing and distribution, believes My JPF is a major component of Jefferson Pilot Financials efforts to implement Web-based technology to streamline its business processes and enable producers to manage their own operations more efficiently. Navigating the site is simple and intuitive, and now every aspect of their business can be taken care of from one site, including investment processing, finding rate information, receiving training and education materials, and accessing customized marketing programs, says May.

Built on a JAVA platform, My JPF is personalized and recognizes all users, whether they are life, annuity, or securities producers, with a single ID and password. Producers will be able to personalize the home page, move or remove items they dont need, and create their own internal and external links using the My Shortcuts feature. The My Correspondence and My Production features are designed to alert the user when new information becomes available.

ROI
IT Uncovers Millions for AIG
Demonstrating the cost benefit of IT interfaces between insurers and reinsurers, American International Group (AIG) was able to unlock in a very short period of time about $250 million in cash flow from reinsurance owed, according to an AIG executive speaking at the International Insurance Societys annual seminar held recently in New York.

[Reinsurance] claims recoverability on a month-to-month basis represents $400 million in cash flow every month, every year [for AIG], says Chris Milton, vice president-reinsurance officer for AIG. Thats $4.8 billion in cash that has to come back into AIG every year at that particular point in time.

To facilitate the recovery of reinsurance due AIG, the carrier developed IT systems that permit it to share data on a seamless basis with major reinsurance markets, Milton indicates. IT also has allowed better claims management, he affirms, noting his department has at any point in time 40 years of reinsurance recoverables from various reinsurance agreements around the world through various reinsurers.

Therefore, when a claim comes through, AIG needs ready access to contract wordings and types of reinsurance certificates that may have been provided. As a result, he says, AIG over the last 10 years has digitized 40 years of reinsurance contract data, so the company can access any document within the reinsurance area in real time.

Milton says there have been a few instances when a reinsurer has asked AIG to prove that the reinsurer was on a certain risk. After AIG sent the reinsurers copies of the documents, some of which were executed 40 years before, he says the claims were paid within a reasonable period of time.

By digitizing data, the whole payment cycle has improved, he adds. What we find is our business partners are much more receptive to doing some things they wouldnt otherwise do [because it improves their overall internal efficiencies with regard to data collection], he says. This is not an easy road to go down, but in a strategic sense, its probably the only road you can go down if you have significant volumes of business where you have an interchange with reinsurers over an extended period of time.

The digitization of its data also has helped AIG track a reinsurers claims payment record, he adds. We started mining some data internally on a specific reinsurer that will remain nameless, he explains. It was ascertained the reinsurer very quickly attended to claims over $1 million, but for any claim less than $1 million and greater than $50,000, the reinsurer would fire off a lot of questions, Milton says. On the other hand, the reinsurer took on average four years to pay any claim below $50,000, he points out. This information was gathered and presented to the reinsurer, which paid all the outstanding claims within three months, he says.

AIGs move to digitize data and share information with reinsurers has provided a big boon to ensuring credit quality of AIGs reinsurance partners, he says. By tracking such data, AIG now can have meaningful discussions with its reinsurance partners and has a better view of its credit risk through the reinsurance partnership, the reinsurers amounts of risk, and how much counterparty risk exposure exists at any particular point in time, he says.

That never could have been done 10 years ago; it was too difficult and has become possible only now through advancements in IT, he says.

He notes further advancements are in the works for AIG as the company begins to look at data warehousing and data mining. Admittedly, however, the company still is balanced equally between paper and electronic exchange, but moves are afoot to further develop electronic exchanges with its reinsurance partners, Milton says.

At AIG, there are major initiatives under way to share information from the front end of the business, via the brokers and risk managers, all the way through to the back end of the business and the companys reinsurance partners, he says.LISA S. HOWARD

WHOS USING WHAT
American Financial Group (AFG) has signed an agreement with AscendantOne that will allow AFGs IT services division to integrate AscendantOnes property/casualty solution into the carriers services-oriented architecture.

BlueCross BlueShield of Western New York and BlueShield of Northeastern New York have chosen Zix Corp., a global provider of e-messaging protection and transaction services, to supply e-messaging protection needs for the healthcare providers.

Auto-Owners Insurance will replace its legacy rating environment with the Example platform from Duck Creek Technologies, Inc. The initial implementation will utilize the rating and underwriting rules engine from Duck Creek.

Unitrin Direct has selected Trumbull Services L.L.C. to provide the insurer with subrogation services using Trumbulls Web-enabled Subrosource subrogation software.

Piedmont Mutual Insurance now is using the Vision 21 homeowners rating module from IDP, enabling the insurer to eliminate double entries and save manual key stroking.

Michigan Millers Mutual Insurance has signed a software licensing agreement with Docucorp International, a provider of enterprise information solutions. Michigan Millers will utilize Docucorps suite of solutions to automate its policy production process. In addition, Docucorp has signed a licensing agreement with Exeter Friendly Society, a provider of private medical insurance to its members. Exeter will automate its policy production.

Electric Insurance (EI) has selected V1STA RateMaker from Decision Research Corp. to automate the creation of EIs rating engine services. EI serves the personal insurance needs of General Electric employees.

The California State Automobile Association (CSAA) has awarded a contract to Accenture that will allow CSAA to upgrade its human resources and financial management systems. Accenture will provide application support and maintenance of these systems on an outsourced basis.

ING Re has chosen CGI to develop a component-based application to support the administration, claims, and billing functions for the carriers group reinsurance products.

The Guardian Life Insurance Company of America has chosen GlassHouse Technologies to provide vendor-neutral TPA consulting services to manage a storage RFP and procurement process.

Arkansas Blue Cross and Blue Shield is partnering its advanced health information network with Webify ClaimsNet from Webify Solutions, giving providers lower-cost choices to manage their claims operation.

MetLife has purchased the PeopleSoft Financial Management and PeopleSoft Enterprise Performance Management products from PeopleSoft, Inc., to extend MetLifes use of global best practices for financial aid and regulatory reporting.

ImageRight has signed new contracts with nine insurers this summer, providing them with document management and workflow solutions. The companies include: Superior Underwriters, Sterling Insurance, Professional Group Plans, Dryden Mutual Insurance, North Island Group, Texas General Agency, Med James, Florida Farm Bureau, and Cooperativa de Seguros Multiples.