Experience
VeraBridge has deployed solutions for P&C insurance in a number of areas. Below, learn more about how VeraBridge has assisted clients with varied business needs such as:
- Managing submission and policies that are complex, requiring tailored forms and pricing, with multiple points of evaluation and review.
- Managing policies that are more standardized, lending themselves to straight-through processing and automated underwriting.
- Rating and pricing submissions online and real time, replacing an manual system
- Increasing the new policy sales volume by better managing and segmenting producer sales channel.
Policy Administration for Large, Complex Policies
Scenario
A multinational insurer and reinsurer focused on large CAT property exposures, wanted to grow its lines of business that focused on direct insurance of large property risks aimed at primary and middle exposure layers. They were held back, however, by a heavy reliance on emails, spreadsheets, and word documents. These manual processes caused deals to fall through the cracks, work to be repeated multiple times, and errors to creep into the process. The company could not simply staff its way to growth; it needed a robust infrastructure.
Solution
The VeraBridge Insurance Platform brought a different opportunity to the company; a web-based, full-featured policy administration system with the flexibility and adaptability to accommodate their large complex policies that often require custom forms and broker negotiations. The VeraBridge Insurance Platform adapted to the insurer’s unique business needs, workflow, decisioning/rules, document management, and integrated with the company’s risk models.
Value
With the VeraBridge Insurance Platform, the carrier processes an average of 155 submissions each month. With the old process, the insurer would have had to ramp up its team to forty people, expand its office facilities, contract additional support, etc. With VeraBridge, the entire unit is run with about a dozen people, including management and sales. More deals are being done, errors are few and far between, and response times are now are a fraction of what they were.
Policy Administration for Smaller, More Standardized Policies
Scenario
To diversify their risk exposure, a multinational insurer wanted to expand its direct property and GL business for smaller policies that were had standard underwriting rules and policy forms. They wanted to achieve competitive advantage by being easy to do business with for producers, automate the underwriting and forms generation to keep staff low, offer direct billing with credit card, ACH, or invoice, and generally enable producers to manage most of the policy actions (like endorsements, sending certificates of insurance, etc.).
Solution
The VeraBridge Insurance Platform, with its rules and workflow-based logic, enabled this company to create a went user interface for producers to create an online submission with a minimal amount of information. This submission information is enriched by real-time calls to third-party data sources (such as to Google Maps for geocoding), then apply underwriting rules to quote the deal. Once the producer accepts the quote, all policy docs are created real time and can be downloaded or e-mailed. After the policy is issued, the policies can be endorsed, canceled, or any other posy-issuance action needed.
Value
With the straight-through processing (quote to issue), producers are able to get a quote and all policy documents in about four minutes, including selection of payment plan and invoicing (or credit card/ACH is desired). The staff requirements for creating and managing policies is minimized.
Read how one carrier implemented real-time, straight-through processing of quote to issue (coming soon)
Real Time Rating and Pricing
Scenario
Partnering with an MGA, a major carrier was underwriting a program. In this program, the MGA and carrier were offering a full-range of coverages for the property, contents, general liability, and commercial auto. The carrier developed its own rating model which used a series of steps and complex Excel spreadsheets to implement a process. Once the submission was input, the "old" process took at a minimum of two to three days to return a rating (and often longer). The MGA and carrier were simply not competitive with this level of service to producers.
Solution
The VeraBridge Rating & Pricing Engine was implemented as a web service (i.e., no software or hardware needed by the MGA or carrier. The implementation took just a few weeks of configuring the carrier’s rating model, testing it, and interfacing to the MGA’s policy admin system. As a side benefit, during the configuration numerous errors were found in the Excel spreadsheets that were causing deals to get improperly rated for several years.
Value
Ratings that took days are now done in 6 – 8 seconds. Therefore, the MGA is able to respond to the producer in minutes or hours instead of days, while almost eliminating errors and significantly improving win rates.
Learn how one client reduced the time for rating and pricing from days to seconds.
Producer Management and Analysis
Scenario
In one of their programs, an MGA was experiencing high attrition and inconsistent performance of producers. Management felt this program had more potential than they were realizing but they were unsure where to focus their limited marketing time and dollars. The information the MGA had came from multiple sources and was often inconsistent. They needed a single source of information about producer historical performance and upcoming opportunities for each producer so that the resources could be applied to those with the most potential. Moreover, the MGA wanted to zero in on a smaller group of producers “their gut told them” were the ones that generated the most premium and the lowest loss ratios. The MGA team wanted to collaboratively work with these select producers to jointly plan and track sales activities.
Solution
VeraBridge Producer Management and Collaboration module was implemented as a web-based source of information, as well as exposing producer-specific information to their selected producers. The MGA staff had, for the first time, a real-time view of producer business (historical and upcoming) they could use to identify exactly where they should target their marketing support. Producers were giving access to the application, but limited to just the business they were writing for that program. The MGA provided leads through the system so they and the producer could develop joint sales plans.
Value
The MGA learned a lot about their producer channel; such as 40% of all producers wrote one policy and never another one and the producers they thought were "best" were in fact price shoppers with low margins. The MGA developed a "preferred producer" program with additional marketing support and commission accelerator at increasing tiers. The net result was a 25% increase in premium the first year, and 28% the second year.
Read about how a carrier and MGA teamed up to increase producer effectiveness (coming soon)