FirstBest Granted Patents for Insurance Systems

First Best Systems, Inc., a provider of insurance software solutions for global insurance carriers, announces it has been awarded two patents by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.

The patents include systems and methods delivered in the FirstBest UMS underwriting management system and agent/broker portal, related to underwriting authority management, automation, and real-time collaboration.

The protected innovations, core to the company's Front Office Suite for insurance, are designed to drive revenue growth and increase profitability across the enterprise, while improving ease of business with the distribution channel.

The FirstBest Front Office Suite combines an underwriting workstation and a business analyst workstation with a Web 2.0 agent/broker portal for commercial- and specialty-lines carriers.

FirstBest UMS helps carriers deploy products to keep up with market shifts and customer demand. It streamlines processes, captures the knowledge of experienced underwriters, helps maintain best practices, and enforces rules. FirstBest Agent provides a transactional agent/broker portal that facilitates new business and renewals. The portal speeds submissions, increases agent/broker productivity, provides visibility into the book of business, and enables agents and brokers to provide customer service.

The two patents granted to FirstBest Systems, numbers 8,073,716 and 8,073,717, include business-centric systems and methods that power the company's Front Office Suite, such as real-time collaboration, underwriting notes, concurrent editing of the application, and managing changes, and the FirstBest Configurator's ability to maintain forms and rules using an intuitive business analyst user interface.

Specific patented functionality includes the underwriting desktop and agent/broker user interface designs in FirstBest UMS and Agent Respectively, as well as:

• Automation of underwriting rules for risk appetite, pre-qualification and risk evaluation
• Underwriting letters of authority management
• Risk- and class-specific underwriting checklists
• Internal and external collaboration for the underwriting process
• Automation of the referral process
• Knowledge management

"FirstBest's mission is to innovate and provide our customers with new, powerful and intuitive solutions for their most challenging problems," says Julian Pelenur, CTO and founder of FirstBest Systems. "Since our founding five years ago, we have continuously developed technologies and processes that help our customers to drive growth and excellence across their business operations. We are proud to be recognized for our underwriting inventions and look forward to delivering new and meaningful solutions for the industry."