IVANS Enhances Exchange to Enable Management of Agency-Carrier Communications

IVANS, Inc. announces it has launched an enhanced Insurance Carrier Exchange (ICE) website to provide an easier way for carriers to manage the process of doing business electronically with their independent agents.  IVANS ICE is the platform that carriers use to register agents and manage the distribution of policy and claims information electronically in batch format to the agents' agency management systems.

This new IVANS ICE website was designed to simplify the carrier's management of the data they send via IVANS ECS solution.  Using industry-standard formats, IVANS ECS allows carriers to download data to electronic mailboxes, enabling agents to use an automated process to pick up their policy data and load into the agency management system, without manual workflows on the part of the agency staff. 

“IVANS is constantly working with our carriers and agents to implement enhancements to our agency interface solutions,” says Jim Ochiltree, president, IVANS Property-Casualty Services.  “Today, IVANS has more than 224,000 connections between agencies and carriers and we are committed to providing solutions that makes it easy for carriers to manage these connections, which IVANS ICE does.”

Enhancements to ICE include: 

• Single Sign-On – Previously carriers had to go to two different sites to manage agency relationships.  IVANS ICE provides a single interface, and therefore single sign-on, to the functionality previously provided by the IVANS Agency Registration and ECS administrative websites.
• Credential Management Improvements – IVANS ICE allows carriers to better control the functions each specific user can perform.  The functionality offered is tailored by type of user, but each company has the flexibility to modify that access even more, to better fit access to a user's specific job responsibilities.
•  Archiving – Files are archived on the IVANS ICE system to allow agents the ability to retrieve a policy or file if necessary.  This archiving has been extended to 90 days based on requests of carriers. 
• Carbon copy – Carriers are now able to copy data sent to one agency mailbox into additional mailboxes, as needed.  This can be useful in situations where an agency has a service center that they want to make sure has access to the same policy data as the producers within the agency, or in cases where an agency is in the process of migrating to a newer version of their agency management system and needs a copy of the data for testing purposes. 

• Enhanced Reporting – Carriers can access even more in-depth information about their implementations of download and real-time.  Some of the existing reports have been extended to include additional information, and several new reports have also been added.  These enhancements give carriers even more visibility into their agency interface initiatives, making it easier for them to track and manage those initiatives.