Feb 20

Innovation, Impact & ICTA – Part One: An Inside Job

By Insurance-Canada.ca BlogEditorNo Comments

Since the announcement of the finalists for the Insurance-Canada Technology Awards (ICTAs), we have had a number of questions along the lines of:  “What makes these nine organizations different from the forty-one other, highly qualified candidates that were nominated?”

There’s a short answer and a long answer.

In this post, we’ll give the short answer and the long answer for one group of the finalists.  Over the next few posts, we’ll put out our take on the remainder.  And remember, the winners will be announced (and awards given) at the ICTA Luncheon and Awards Ceremony on March 5, 2012.

So here’s the short answer:  Why these nine?  Because the ICTA jury – consisting of 7 recognized insurance technology experts – said so.  The jury was charged with using two criteria for guidance:  Innovation and Impact on Business.  We posted on the process the jurors chose to take after their first meeting late last year.

Looking at the results, however, we’d like to offer our opinions of what differentiated these 9.  One group of nominees focused on internal applications.  In this group, we would put:

  • RMS with its iClarify product, which provides it clients portal or web services access to RMS risk management, underwriting support services.  This improves field underwriting by brokers and streamlines internal underwriting time, while improving accuracy.
  • The Economical for its implementation of Pitney Bowes Software’s location intelligence platform for underwriters to confirm & map location, map in force policies, recognize key exposures, evaluate aggregate risk.  This improves effectiveness and efficiency in underwriting, claims, and marketing.
  • Donovan Insurance Brokers for its implementation of an integration strategy involving it Keal BMS, Brovada’s NexCentre, voice recording, and a number of office productivity tools to support increase in effectiveness and efficiency.  The result has been improved staff satisfaction, better customer service, increased retention, and growth (organic and by acquisition).

The thread with this group seems to be careful implementation of technology, focusing on improved effectiveness and efficiency, resulting in carefully measured/monitored business innovation.

But that’s our interpretation.  We’ll make conjectures on other threads over the next week or so.  You can ask the judges themselves at the ICTA Awards Lunch.

Note:  All of the finalists will be profiled in more detail in the February 2012 issue of Canadian Insurance Top Broker Magazine, which will be distributed at the Insurance-Canada Technology Conference.

Insurance-Canada Technology Awards
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Feb 15

Canadian Insurance Telematics Poll Results

By Insurance-Canada.ca BlogEditorNo Comments

Insurance-Canada.ca conducted an on-line poll on the subject of telematics in insurance.  While not scientific, the results open a window onto the thinking of insurance practitioners and suppliers in Canada.

The results generally support trends we have reported on in this space.  There is clear interest in telematics by a cross section of the industry and most believe that Telematics is being used in Canada for insurance now or will be used soon.  And, respondents feel that there are several areas that Telematics will impact for insurance.  One poll result, however, is an open question.  We’ll get to that.

The composition of the respondents reflects the components of the industry.  One third of respondents were from insurance companies , another third represented brokers or MGAs, the balance were suppliers, service providers, and others.

In regard to insurance use, the majority of respondents – 75% – believe that telematics is already being used or is very close on the horizon.

Few respondents think that technology is a barrier to implementation.  The largest segment believe that customer acceptance is the major impediment followed by carrier appetite/initiative.

 

The majority felt that telematics driven usage-based insurance or pay-as-you-drive schemes (primarily implemented in personal lines insurance) offered the  greatest value for insurance.  Interestingly, almost one third of respondents said risk management and asset tracking (generally, elements in commercial lines insurance) as well as education offered the most value.

 

As we said at the beginning, one  result is something of an enigma.  Half of the respondents indicated that they were not clear what telematics is, and another 10% did not know the uses of telematics in insurance.  However, when these two groups were filtered out, there were no changes in the ordering of the results for the other questions.

There are any number of explanations.   We won’t speculate here, because there’s a better place to get answers to this and other questions relating to insurance and telematics. There is a panel of experts on telematics and insurance that will be presenting at the upcoming Insurance-Canada Technology Conference March 5th.  We’re looking forward to their input on this and other questions.  And we hope you’ll join us in getting answers.

 

 

2012 Technology Conference, Telematics, Uncategorized
Feb 12

Broker Imperative: Enhance Customer Relationships and Support Profitatbility with Technology

By Insurance-Canada.ca BlogEditorNo Comments

Independent brokers need to focus on the inherent strength of their distribution system – the relationships they have with their customers – by making maximum use of technologies that reduce friction and improve customer communications.  Fortunately, there are new technologies and support structures that can help.  And there is an event coming up where the developers and adopters of these technologies will be available for consultation.

The independent broker distribution system is facing a number of challenges:  Direct marketers, carriers moving to mixed distribution channels, a continuing soft market, and lack of consensus on broker connectivity. However, research from agent associations in the US and broker associations in Canada continue to suggest that independents have a lead over other channels in the relationships with end consumers.

However, that lead is being eroded by two factors:

  1. The disproportionate amount of time that brokers have to spend on non-productive activities; and
  2. The lack of strategies to adopt modern customer communications.

Fortunately, technology and support is becoming available to assist brokers in both areas.

The first step to reducing non-productive activities is to identify all of the activities in the brokers office and get a solid understanding of the costs associated and the revenues generated.  In days past, gathering this information and industry benchmarks were time-consuming and sometimes costly.  Modern technology has addressed this.  Leading broker management system vendors are including operations management and business intelligence tools in their offerings and supporting industry efforts to gather benchmarking data on broker operations.

With that knowledge, brokers can take steps to improve operations and work with carriers to develop strategies to attack productive market segments.  And technology can be put in place to accurately measure success levels in these areas.

With regard to modern communications, there is increasing evidence that consumers generally and insurance consumers specifically are expecting to communicate in whatever manners they – the consumers – choose .  This includes traditional – phone, fax, email – and non-traditional – social media.  We have noted in this space that independent distributors who get into social media are seeing real rewards.

2012 Insurance-Canada.ca Technology ConferenceA questions for brokers is where to begin.  We (humbly) suggest the the 2012 Insurance-Canada Technology Conference (ICTA) on March 5, 2012 as a great place to start.  There is an entire stream devoted to distribution technology and will include  presentations on operations measurement, benchmarking, and management. In addition, there are several sessions focusing on customer communications, including the integration of social media into communications strategies.

The day begins with a Strategy Session Panel, comprised of industry leaders, discussing broker challenges and includes a luncheon keynote address from Gartner’s Kimberly Harris-Ferrante presenting new Canadian research, which includes information on broker facing technology.

Registration information is available here.  A number of our sponsors have made arrangements for discounted registration for brokers.   We would look forward to welcoming you March 5.

 

 

2012 Technology Conference, Broker Technolgy, Social Media
Feb 09

Analytics: The New Competitive Landscape Differentiator

By Insurance-Canada.ca BlogEditorNo Comments

There is increasing evidence that intelligent use of data – to gain understanding and to anticipate results – is becoming the foundation for success in the new landscape of insurance.  A number of experts in the area will be presenting at the 2012 Insurance-Canada Technology Conference  on March 5, 2012 in Toronto.

As reported in Insurance & Technology, a recent survey by Towers Watson found that 85% of the 69 insurers polled “use or are planning to use” predictive modeling.  Further, while there has been emphasis on its use in the personal lines arena, Commercial lines carriers  are showing significant interest and “are planning or implementing programs at a 70% clip. ”

Claims is one area of specific interest. The same article cites Liberty Mutual’s implementations in its Workers Comp program which found that 50 percent of most workers compensation policyholders’ claims drive 90 percent of total claim costs.  A statement from Liberty Mutual indicated that “Identifying these early and getting them the proper resources quickly, delivers the best possible outcomes for injured workers and their employers.”

A number of suppliers to the industry are focusing on data and analytics for the P&C industry.  Several  of these organizations will be presenting at  the 2012 Insurance-Canada Technology Conference in Toronto on March 5, 2012, including the two Platinum Sponsors, SAS and IBM.

Dan McKenzie, Fraud Analytics Specialst, SAS Canada, will be presenting on “The Insurance Fraud Race: Using Information and Analytics to Stay Ahead of Criminals”.  This session will highlight the benefits insurers are realizing in the use of analytics for fraud detection and prevention and provide insight into organizing and implementing a successful analytics program.

Analytics are also powerful tools in marketing, customer relationship management, and underwriting.  In his presentation “Turning Information into Insight”, Neil Isford, IBM VP Business Analytics & Optimization, will focus on how insurance companies are using business analytics to strengthen customer care & insight, risk/finance optimization as well as claims processing. Neil will also talk about how emerging technologies such as Big Data, social media analytics, and IBM’s Watson, can help you make informed decisions with greater confidence.

The challenge is how to use these powerful tools in the current environment.  The 2012 Insurance-2012 Insurance-Canada.ca Technology ConferenceCanada Technology Conference offers a unique opportunity to explore ways to meet this challenge.  We look forward to seeing you there.

 

2012 Technology Conference, Analytics, Business Intelligence, Consumer Insight and Action
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Feb 06

Insurance Telematics In Canada: Poll Will Offer Opinions; Panel Will Offer Knowledge

By Insurance-Canada.ca BlogEditorNo Comments

Is Canada poised to jump onto the telematics train for insurance?  Insurance-Canada is approaching this question on two levels.  First, a poll is underway  to get a sense of levels of interest.  Second, a panel is preparing to offer expert knowledge on the subject at the 2012 Insurance-Canada Technology Conference.

We have written here about the progress that Telematics applications – including pay-as-you-drive  schemes – are making in various parts of the world including the US, Europe, and the UK. We have suggested that Telematics is one of the trends to watch in 2012.  We haven’t written much on Canada simply because we were only seeing some stirrings behind the scenes.  Recently, Insurance-Canada launched an on-line poll to test that assumption.

The short poll was opened on February 2, 2012 and is available here.  It will close on February 10th.  We’re looking forward to your comments.  Already, a good number of your colleagues have expressed their opinions, with respondents primarily in the practitioner ranks, split roughly equally between distributors and insurance carriers. We will feature results from the poll here shortly after it closes.

(As an aside, we did have an interesting response from a broker who believes that we are asking the wrong question.  We are checking to see if he will elaborate.)

Also, the 2012 Insurance-Canada Technology Conference will feature a number of sessions on mobile technology generally, 2012 Insurance-Canada.ca Technology Conferenceand one session entitled Telematics: Learning to Drive in the New Landscape will feature an expert panel which will describe the current implementations and how Telematics may evolve in Canada.

We’d welcome you to participate in the poll, attend the conference, and comment here.  Preferably, all of the above.

 

 

2012 Technology Conference, Telematics
Feb 02

Modern Technology: Underpinning Insurance Growth, Profitability; Focus of ICTC 2012

By Insurance-Canada.ca BlogEditorNo Comments

Evidence continues to mount that eliminating constraints imposed by legacy systems is less an operational requirement than a strategic necessity for 2012 Insurance-Canada.ca Technology Conferenceinsurance carriers.  This is evidenced by the fact that many of the sessions at the 2012 Insurance-Canada Technology Conference (ICTC) will focus on growth and profitability opportunities only available with modern core technologies.

Writing in PropertyCasualty360.com, Steven Callahan,  a senior consultant and practice director for the Robert E. Nolan Company, notes that most organizations have taken steps to improve efficiency, reduce cycle time, improve pricing, strengthen brand;  many to the point of diminishing return.  Callahan contends that: “Leadership within the industry must focus on innovative integration and leveraging of technology to significantly alter the mechanics of how insurance is designed, communicated, distributed, and serviced.”  Callahan lists four areas requiring focused attention:

  • nimble adaption to customized product design
  • extensive, ubiquitous service options
  • analytically informed operational functionality
  • consolidated, holistic, and economically valued customer information

Virtually all of these elements are subjects of one or more presentations at the 2012 Insurance-Canada Technology Conference, March 5, 2012 in Toronto.

While technology is at the heart of much of this change, informed, nimble management is the key element to success. Craig Weber, CEO of Celent, will be presenting on ‘Creative Disruption in insurance’.    In this session, Weber will review the change drivers and provide insight, gained from research, on how to manage discomfort associated with the change and capitalize on creative elements.

Once disruption has taken place, a new vision of integrated processes and data is required to guide the implementation of new technology.  Several presenters, including Oracle, and MajescoMastek will explore the challenges and game-changing opportunities offered with modern technology.

While much attention is given to marketing and underwriting, management of claims offers both bottom and top line improvements.  Industry experts and practitioners, including Guidewire and TD Meloche, Gore Mutual and Uniban will discuss results of groundbreaking work in utilizing communications and benchmarking  with claims.

Flexibility is key to modern organizations.  One method of achieving flexibility is by shedding the need for an insurance organization to manage its technology and applications infrastructure.  Exigen will be presenting on the benefits of moving to a cloud environment to allow more agility in operations.

Modern technology – including implementation and management -  is not the domain of insurance carriers alone. Several suppliers of broker management systems – including Keal and Applied Systems – will be offering techniques to better utilize operational metrics available from the systems to manage and control broker activities to focus on growth and profitability.

As usual, the conference will include an active exhibit area where practitioners, suppliers, presenters, and attendees can discuss needs and successes in an informal environment.

More details and registration information for the 2012 ICTC is available here.

 

2012 Technology Conference, Analytics, Business-Technology Alignment, Claims, Cloud Computing, Mobile Technlogy
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Jan 30

Insurance Fraud in Prime Time

By Gordon Alexander IBM Canada LtdNo Comments

Is it just me or did you also notice the abundance of fraud news stories last year in insurance? It makes me wonder if there’s a TV show in the making; you know “Torn from today’s news stories, names changed to protect the parties” akin to Law & Order or CSI. I can see it now - Canadian Insurance Fraud: Special Investigations Unit (CIF:SIU).

Seriously, when I see headlines like RCMP arrest 4 in interprovincial fraud scheme and Toronto-area police bust 14 fraudsters and FSCO cracks down on fraud as examples of last year’s insurance industry stories, it makes me wonder: Why the increase? After some research and thinking about it, I’ve come up with three main reasons (near as I can tell):

  1. Economy: Insurers today need every penny they can get in this soft economy.  Thus, they can’t afford to lose their margins to fraud. Maybe in the past the cost of chasing and prosecuting fraud was more than the fraud itself. But not anymore.
  2. Legislation: There seems to be an increased focus and new teeth coming to help address fraud and increasing premiums. The prime example from last year was the establishment of Ontario’s Auto Insurance Anti-Fraud Task Force which has produced a number of recommendations that are meant to get tougher on fraud.
  3. Technology: Tools and technology to aid in detecting fraud that were once out of reach to the insurance industry (whether due to cost or complexity) are now more viable. With the advent of the internet, cloud computing, and social networks, the ability to share and collaborate among insurers and agencies has improved (okay I’ll admit that this has also made it easier for fraudsters to work together as well).

It’s this third point that interests me the most (hey I’m an Insurance Industry Architect by trade and also a technology geek at heart). When you consider that today most of us have smartphones that have a million times more memory, and are thousands of times faster and hundreds of times smaller, than the guidance computer used for the Apollo moon missions, it’s easy to see that technology has advanced. Question is then: how best to apply it to finding fraud?

The other thing that strikes me is that like the CSI crime lab, many techniques and tools need to be applied in order to help fight fraud. This is definitely not a one tool approach. Fraud must be attacked across the lifecycle of the claim process (even into underwriting in support of fraud prevention). A variety of tools need to be brought to bear in order to help transform/cleanse the data, to analyze and detect fraud using different techniques such as scoring, visualization, and predictive analytics, and to provide identity insight.

In some cases all your SIU might need is Google. The latest story from ICBC highlighted that the individual who perpetrated the fraud was bragging on his Facebook page about it. But that wouldn’t make for good television viewing, now would it? Maybe as a sitcom.

Editor’s Note:  Gordon Alexander is an Industry Architect, Insurance, with IBM Canada Ltd.  He likely watches too much TV, but will stop long enough to speak at the 2012 Insurance-Canada Technology Conference.

 

Claims
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Jan 27

The Jury is Working … Hard

By Insurance-Canada.ca BlogEditorNo Comments

Earlier this week, the Insurance-Canada Technology Awards (ICTA) Jury met for the second time, to review the finalists prior to the actual vote for category winners.  One thing is clear:  The jurors are doing some tough work for a good cause.

To review the path to date:  Mid-year 2011, Insurance-Canada began accepting nominations for ICTAs to be presented in 3 categories:  Insurer, Distributor, and Supplier.  Details of the qualifications are available on the web site, but, to summarize, “The primary criterion for all awards is the positive impact that a specific technology or application of technology has had on business.”

Insurance-Canada received 50 nominations.  A jury consisting of practitioners, analysts, and industry experts reviewed the nominations before and during a virtual meeting, then cast ballots to select three finalists in each category.  We gave our impressions of the virtual meeting in a previous post.  The result were nine finalist nominees:

P&C Distributors

  • AP Reid for ZipSure, a customer-facing fully automated insurance service targeted at tenants of larger landlords;
  • Donovan Insurance Brokers for their overall use of technology, encompassing customer-facing and market-facing applications, and automated support for staff, allowing a focus on quality customer service;
  • Ingle International for the technology they use to develop and operate micro-sites used by school administrators and student customers.

Insurers

  • SGI Canada for the pioneering work implementing standards for downloading of broker copy of policy declaration pages and broker memos as part of their daily EDI download transactions;
  • The Economical Insurance Group for a business location intelligence platform allowing underwriters to map a location, analyze current in-force policies, recognize key exposures and evaluate aggregate risk;
  • Unica Insurance (formerly York Fire & Casualty) for their project to directly connect Broker transactions from the BMS to Unica’s systems.

Suppliers

  • Mondial for its implementation of an online claims portal resulting in a high level of adoptions;
  • RMS for iClarify, a validation and valuation tool that provides brokers and insurers with residential property intelligence;
  • Zycomp + MASTERCOM for the technology development and integration allowing downloading of broker copy of policy declaration pages and broker memos as part of their daily EDI download transactions. These are automatically filed at the broker without intervention.

Shortly after the finalists were announced, CI Top Broker Magazine began  interviewing each of the organizations for profiles to be included in its February edition.

The next step was a second meeting of the jury to review the finalists in preparation for the final vote for the category winners.  A virtual meeting was conducted and jurists are now deliberating and casing ballots for the category winners.

That takes us to now.  After all the ballots are cast, and while the results are being tabulated, we will introduce the jurors in this space.  We think you will be impressed with the quality of individuals who agreed to make the selections. The results of the ballot will be announced at the ICTA Luncheon to be held in conjunction with the 2012 Insurance-Canada Technology Conference on March 5, 2012 in Toronto.

Those are the facts, but here is an important sidebar.  The discussion at the Juror’s last meeting was not as lively as at the previous meeting.  It was clear that the jurors had taken their responsibilities seriously in preparing for the meeting, so the discussion was more for clarification than education.   But the mood was intense.  Towards the end, one juror, a very well respected insurance-technology expert, summarized the mood by a comment.  “I don’t know about the rest of you,” he said, “But it is going to be hard to choose the best out of nominations that are this good.”

We think this speaks to the quality of all the work being done to bring technology to bear on insurance in Canada.  And, we appreciate the hard work these jurors are doing, and look forward to celebrating the results on March 5th.

2012 Technology Conference, Insurance-Canada Technology Awards
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Jan 23

Insurance Telematics Reality Check: It Really is Gaining Momentum

By Insurance-Canada.ca BlogEditorNo Comments

We identified telematics – the use of integrated technologies in vehicles – as a trend for Canadian insurers in 2012.  Several recent reports are suggesting that the trend is gaining momentum, and a tipping point may have been reached.

Phil Gusman recently reviewed  a Celent report, entitled “Telematics-Based Insurance: Has Its Time Finally Arrived?” in PropertyCasualty360.  According to Gusman, the report suggests that insurers are not only overcoming concerns that have impeded implementation of the technology, the insurers are finding new potential uses that transcend risk selection and underwriting, such as fraud detection.

According to Gusman, this reinforces recent comments made by Moody’s that the implementation of the technology is progressing at such a rate that insurers who are lagging will “find themselves insuring shrinking pools of poorer drivers—who will appear to be normal drivers if traditional rating factors are used.”

Writing in Insurance & Technology, Stuart Rose, global insurance marketing manager at Cary, N.C.-based SAS, argues that the quality of the underwriting will increase substantially as telematics driven data allows more precise underwriting based on experiential data.  And this is increasing uptake within the industry. Rose concludes that “The technology is still in its infancy with regard to its application in the field, but its adoption rate is dramatically increasing and it has the potential to revolutionize the auto insurance industry.”

According to Gusman, Towers Watson thinks that uptake within this insurance industry passed a tipping point in 2011.  He quotes Robin Harbage, director of usage-based insurance for Towers Watson: “Until now, a few key players were pushing quite hard. Today, almost all major players have a public program or internal pilots.”

Gusman concludes from these elements: “True innovation is rare in the insurance industry, but telematics may be a genuine example. The technology is still in its infancy with regard to its application in the field, but its adoption rate is dramatically increasing and it has the potential to revolutionize the auto insurance industry.”

The 2012 Insurance-Canada Technology Conference will feature a panel of experts 2012 Insurance-Canada.ca Technology Conferenceentitled: “Telematics: Learning to Drive in the New Landscape”.

 

 

2012 Technology Conference, Analytics, Telematics
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Jan 22

The New Landscape for Brokers: This Show is For You

By Insurance-Canada.ca BlogEditor2 Comments

2012 Insurance-Canada.ca Technology Conference

Insurance brokers in Canada are facing an unprecedented two-pronged threat:  competition from new distribution models is coming just as a stubborn soft market reduces profitability of business that can be retained.  Technology offers one of the few avenues to address both of these threats:  to allow competitive marketing against direct marketers while improving profitability through efficiency.

But the broker technology environment is crowded, and brokers have limited time and resources to explore solutions  Where can a broker turn?  The 2012 Insurance-Canada Technology Conference (ICTC), being held in Toronto on March 5, 2012, is a great near-term option.

The theme of the conference – “The New Landscape: Social Business, Mobile, Analytics, Modern Technology” – reflects a number of industry issues we hear brokers discussing today. The conference will feature industry analysts and practitioners bringing new research (including original Canadian research) to discuss such topics as 2012: The Age of Digitalization for Insurance (Kimberly Harris-Ferrante, Gartner)  and Creative Disruption in Insurance (Craig Weber, Celent).  There are also several sessions addressing social media, mobile, modern technology and analytics.

The conference has a number of elements of interest to brokers specifically.  Leading management system suppliers are sponsoring and will be exhibiting.  Also, several suppliers and practitioners will be presenting on topics of interest to broker principals and operations managers.  Topics will include Measurement of Transaction Costs vs. Revenue,  Challenges and Directions in Commercial Lines Processing, and Paperless Processing for Brokers.

In addition, IBAO, CSIO, and a number of broker companies (including Unica Insurance, The Economical, Intact, RSA, and The Dominion)  are supporting the conference and will be sending delegates to interact with brokers.

A focal point of the conference will the the presentation of the third annual Insurance-Canada Technology Awards (ICTAs) at a special luncheon.  Several of the award finalists are brokers and several others are either carriers or suppliers implementing applications supporting broker distribution.

Insurance-Canada has applied for RIBO credits in the Management category.  Registration information is available on-line.  Sponsoring organizations have arranged for special pricing for their brokers.

So, a cost-effective and efficient use of a day that includes an ‘award winning’ lunch with your carriers and colleagues … Why wait?  Register Now.

 

2012 Technology Conference, Broker-Carrier Relationships, Broker=Carrier Connectivity, Insurance-Canada Technology Awards
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