Who’s Buying What
Insurance Networking News, July 1, 2008
JEVCO INSURANCE GOES LIVE WITH POINT-OF-SALE PORTAL
Jevco, a subsidiary of Kingsway Financial Services Inc. and a provider of standard and specialized property/casualty insurance products, is now live on a point-of-sale portal called Jevcom from Harcase Software Ltd., Mississauga, Ontario, for its personal automobile line of business. The Montreal-based insurer successfully rolled out new business functionality to its internal workforce, and has initiated a pilot program with its broker network.
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Harcase’s portal provides Jevco with a customized platform pre-populated with queries and exception underwriting rules to deliver rapid decision-making and policy delivery to its broker field force.
President and CEO Serge Lavoie remarked that in partnering with Harcase to deliver Jevcom, Jevco was able to go from “Wang to Web” in a matter of five months.
“In the past, our brokers were paperbound—it took us a number of weeks to deliver a policy document,” Lavoie says. “With the Harcase portal in place, our brokers can input complete policy information online and will receive client documents immediately and a policy document within a day or two.”
Currently, Jevco brokers can take advantage of the portal’s Centre for Studies in Insurance Operations standards-related download capabilities. Within the next 12 months, additional phases of the implementation project will include CSIO upload capabilities as well as enhanced support for the automobile line of business and support for the property and motorcycle lines of business, report the companies.
PEKIN LICENSES FISERV ADVANCED BILLING SYSTEM
Pekin Insurance Co., a provider of property/casualty, life, individual, business, and group products, plans to implement an advanced billing solution from Fiserv Inc., a Brookfield, Wis., provider of technology solutions for the financial and insurance industries.
Located in Pekin, Ill., the 87-year-old carrier has grown to service more than 452,000 policyholders across five Midwestern states, which has necessitated the need for a modern, more flexible billing system, ultimately choosing Fiserv’s Advanced Billing (FAB). FAB supports personal and commercial lines of business in any combination: agency, account and group/special billing, with different effective and expiration dates. It is an open-architected, platform-flexible solution using J2EE standards.
“Our cross-functional team took a long-term view. We wanted the solution selected to meet future as well as current functionality needs,” says Rod McKimson, VP of systems for Pekin Insurance. “FAB provides more flexibility and efficiency, and will enable better customer service for our agents and insureds. From a technical perspective, the FAB architecture, with its service layer and service orientation, aligns well with ours.”
In follow-up news, the company reports that Allstate Insurance Co.’s Workplace Division is realizing superior results from its project to implement an automated Fiserv solution that supports growth objectives and improves efficiencies. Working strategically with Fiserv, Allstate reports it has met key objectives ahead of schedule, including improved ease of doing business for employers and independent agents, and increased sales and economies of scale for the Allstate Workplace Division (AWD). At the heart of the solution is the Fiserv Life Portraits ES worksite engine. Using the capabilities of Fiserv Life Portrait ES—paired with the ease of integration provided by ACORD transaction standards—Fiserv and AWD provide agents with an enrollment solution complete with multi-product electronic application and electronic signatures.
CHUBB RENEWS WITH IVANS
The Chubb Group of Insurance Cos. signed a multi-year contract renewal to use IVANS E-Commerce Server (ECS), an electronic mailbox solution designed to make it easier for Chubb to share information and do business with its insurance agents.
IVANS ECS is a data storage and retrieval solution for electronic mailboxing that is designed to enable agents to download carrier information via a secure, high-speed broadband connection. Compatible with 34 agency management systems, the solution provides carriers and agents access to Web-based management tools for administrative tasks and online policy inquiries. Carriers do not have to allocate resources to manage agent phone calls and technical issues that may arise in the retrieval or processing of data.
IVANS Inc., Stamford, Conn., reports that Chubb joins more than 180 of the country’s leading carriers in downloading via IVANS ECS across 135,000 agency-carrier relationship pairs.
Warren, N.J.-based Chubb, an IVANS customer since 1988, has more than 1,700 active agents downloading via IVANS ECS for personal and commercial lines. These download transactions include claims download, commission billing, activities and notifications and policy download.
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