When Dan Epstein welcomes you to a conference room in his New York office, it's likely that he won't just offer you a cup of coffee. “We also have some Chinese tea,” he said before a recent interview in the New York headquarters of his company, ReSource Pro–highlighting a cultural tie to the fact that most of his employees don't work in New York, but in Qingdao, China.

Mr. Epstein is chief executive officer of ReSource Pro, which he describes as a “remote staffing” company that performs back-office processing tasks for managing general agents, program managers and retail broker clients using a staff based in China. Yet the CEO also reveals that he only knows about 10 words of Chinese.

There is no need to know more, even though roughly 120 of ReSource Pro's 125 employees work in Qingdao, according to Mr. Epstein–who explains that the Chinese staffers are bright college students who speak fluent English.

“We don't answer telephones, because we don't assume that our peoples' spoken English is without an accent, even though their comprehension is extremely high,” he added, noting there is no direct communication between Chinese workers and customers of ReSourcePro's MGA clients.

In addition, communications between the MGAs and Chinese students take place mainly via e-mail, he said.

Essentially working the night shift (doing processing tasks for MGAs in the United States after their businesses shut down for the day), Mr. Epstein stresses the fact that one of the key benefits his company offers is to add–not replace–an MGA's workforce, allowing the MGA to focus on client relationships and business.

Distinguishing his firm's “remote staffing” operation from common perceptions of an outsourcing model, he said, “Our clients typically are not looking to lose people. We're not a downsizing tool” for the client firms–generally small to midsized insurance agencies, MGAs, retail brokers and program administrators.

Such firms hire ReSource Pro “because they're looking to grow–and grow cost-effectively–while improving their productivity,” Mr. Epstein said.

He explained that the parent company of ReSource Pro–Distinguished Programs Group–after stumbling onto the remote staffing idea through a series of coincidental events, decided to institutionalize the concept that its executives initially saw as a way of boosting morale and improving employee retention, then as a boost to the top- and bottom lines.

He said assistant underwriters and producers, during the first few months of their jobs, probably don't mind doing routine processing tasks that are so often a part of a program administrator's operations.

After awhile, however, new hires for the New York-based program manager would view such tasks as “very demoralizing.” What they “really wanted to do was to spend more time on the phone with clients–generating new business or doing the heavy-duty underwriting work,” he said.

The discovery that remote staffing could relieve the home office staff of processing burdens was quite accidental, he said, noting that it came about when an ex-employee, Matt Bruno, enlisted the help of Chinese students to plow through a processing backlog en route to a new job in China.

Mr. Bruno, who had left Distinguished Programs to take a job teaching English in China, returned to the United States briefly when the SARS epidemic broke out. At about the same time, Distinguished Programs was faced with a processing nightmare. Kemper went bankrupt, and the firm had to rewrite 15,000 complex, multiyear D&O policies with another carrier in the space of three months.

Mr. Bruno pitched in while he was in the United States, and took a laptop back to China with him to help finish the job on his return. Finding some more help in China, he started hiring college graduates and training them on what to do, giving birth to the idea of remote staffing.

Why are Chinese workers willing to perform routine tasks that American workers may feel are monotonous?

Mr. Epstein said the Chinese staffers remain motivated by the variety of business transacted by ReSource Pro's customer base. “Our clients are such that there tends to be many different tasks,” allowing the workers to be cross-trained.

He added the promise of being future team leaders and the opportunity to work in an international environment are further motivating factors. “They're learning about the American insurance industry, interacting daily with American employees, [and] they are troubleshooting and figuring things out.”

Mr. Epstein contends that he rarely gets a pushback from MGAs and program managers over the idea of using Chinese rather than American workers. “In the last year-and-a-half, I may have had three comments,” he said. In many cases, the MGAs “just cannot find good people.”

Most potential clients, he contends, understand that remote staffing doesn't threaten jobs of U.S. employees, but instead improves their daily work experiences. And with ReSource Pro hiring an MGA's back office “at a fraction of what they would pay themselves, it allows them more money to invest, hire back, or save on other things.”

While Mr. Epstein is keen on stressing the ability for MGAs and program managers to grow the top-line by seeking new business, he said there are also obvious and hidden bottom-line cost benefits.

Mr. Epstein said the typical U.S. administrative staffer–a customer service representative or assistant underwriter–might earn anywhere from $25,000 to $45,000. Adding benefits, vacation pay, sick time and overhead costs (office space, computers for each worker), “we're probably 40-to-50 percent of the cost of an equivalent person in the United States.”

He went on to discuss intangible costs, such as expending management time on recruiting (interviewing candidates, paying search firms), and then training and supervising. “One of the benefits with us is once we've got the procedures down, [if] the client [needs to] add another person, it's instant. They don't have to go out and do the hiring or the training.”

“In fact, for the first month of training, we train them on our dime,” he said, explaining that every ReSource Pro engagement involves a one-month free trial.

“We start with a single person,” asking that individual to identify two or three tasks that would relieve some back-office burden or make job content more interesting. ReSource Pro then sits with the person and documents the workflows for reproduction by the Chinese staff.

“Then we come in and we run a trial for a month at our risk,” he said, noting that if work meets or exceed expectations, “we sign a contract for one person.” Then clients typically seek to expand services, in some cases incentivizing their staff to identify nonproductive tasks for ReSource Pro.

Like Mr. Bruno's initial experience with remote staffing, ReSource Pro workers use the same methods that customers would to connect to their systems from the road.

“We don't have our agency system. We don't have our own agency software. We are completely system/software agnostic,” Mr. Epstein said, noting that Chinese workers are given a password to connect to client systems through an exchange server.

“Clients create an e-mail address to their system for us and allow some [restricted] access to certain parts of their agency systems, giving us instructions on how to function as an integrated part of their team,” he said, adding that “none of the data leaves the client's system. There's nothing being stored in China.”

Mr. Epstein said remote staffing may not be for everyone, distinguishing wholesalers from program administrators.

“Any task that follows a clear set of rules that we can generate a set of procedures for it, we can do,” he said, noting that initial engagements involved program managers because they “obviously have very similar steps, similar rules for a specific program.”

While ReSource Pro manages some very complex multistep processes and can deal with multiple exceptions, “if every single policy was unique and different, it might not be efficient to do this,” he said, referring to the situation for a wholesale broker. “If there are similarities in policy checking, in data reconciliation, invoicing, endorsements, application entry, issuing certificates, loss runs, [then] it makes sense to be using us as a resource.”

As for other limitations, Mr. Epstein said, “we're not taking away all the processing. We can't do real-time work because China's on a 12-hour time difference,” he said. But that time difference can also be a benefit, he said. “Anything that comes in late in the day–submissions, loss runs, certificates–we can process overnight and have back in the morning.”

He said that while ReSource Pro does not make underwriting decisions, it can gather information for underwriters. “There's no reason the underwriter should go through 100 percent [of the applications] to find the 10 percent of the problems,” he said–noting, for example, if an underwriter is willing to write property policies for a building that is 40 stories or less, ReSource Pro might compare the application with the inspection report to flag a 42-story building that's ineligible for coverage.

Currently, ReSource Pro serves 15 clients–roughly half MGAs and program managers, with the other half being retailers.

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