Workflow Perspectives

As more and more Commercial Lines Business Owner Packages are automated at carrier web sites, the problem of redundant entry falls upon personnel in the agencies. There are a number of intermediary approaches that can eliminate this redundancy from single entry multi company rating access vendors to on-line wholesalers to a new full function insurance Exchange. All of these approaches allow the agent to view carrier underwriting appetites in one web location reducing the number of unproductive and unnecessary submissions.

These software capabilities allow the agency to input the BOP application data just once with the data then sent on to the carrier systems where, via either screen-scraping or straight-through XML technology, the carrier systems are asked to provide a quote and return it to the agent who compares each of them electronically. Once the final quote is selected, the agent fills out the additional underwriting data to the carrier policy system where the policy is bound, issued, and returned to the agency.

There are significant savings for the agency that no longer has to login to each carrier web site and enter 80-90% of the same data for each carrier and then manually compare the quotes and then re-login to complete the policy transaction.