Insurance-Canada.ca - Where Insurance & Technology Meet

The Jury is Working … Hard

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.