By Stan Sauerwein
A decade of software development by Tec4 will soon be innovatively integrated into the backend of the ING Insurance Company of Canada's website in western Canada.
ING, working for the past seven months with the developers of Policy Works, has succeeded in providing brokers with a real time quoting mechanism that Tec4 president, Kevin Campbell, calls "magical".
This new addition to ING's broker portal is currently in beta testing and will be rolled out to ING brokers in the western region in October. A rollout to eastern and Maritime brokers will be considered, based on an evaluation of the service here.
An amazingly fast implementation was possible, Campbell says, because Tec4 had already devoted 12 years to the refinement of the Calgary-based commercial management system.
Using a concept Tec4 named "Powered by Policy Works", they seamlessly wrapped ING's commercial management module in the quoting website. It will allow brokers who don't have Policy Works to do a quote via the web, and brokers that do subscribe to Policy Works to send data from their system to the website and get a quote in real time, without double entry.
"Typically, a broker is using Policy Works to market a risk to more than one Company so they have all the commercial info on their client within our standard marketing module already," says Campbell. "When it comes to remarket a risk they pick the Companies they want in Policy Works. For any market other than ING, it will generate an Adobe Acrobat PDF that gets e-mailed or faxed to the underwriter requesting a quote.
"For ING, what happens is fairly magical, I think. The request gets converted from the generic survey module coverages into the ING coverages automatically. Then it is sent to the ING website."
Campbell says that Policy Works will pre-populate the ING website with the submission information. Upon accessing the website the broker may have to respond to a few industry-dependent questions formulated by ING. These are requests for data that Policy Works does not gather, but data that ING needs to provide the commercial insurance quote. He calls the step an 'eligibility tunnel'.
Once the questions have been answered, one click on the 'quote tab' of the web page will generate a real time quote with payment plans immediately. The broker can download a quote document suitable for presentation to the client in seconds.
"The broker gets a copy that has the rates, premium and location details in it. If he likes the quote and the client approves, he can click on the 'policy tab'. That will bind the policy and the broker immediately receives a binder document he can print. Simultaneously, the Powered by Policy Works system prints the policy at ING's offices in Calgary and it is posted the same day."
Campbell expects to be working with ING for some time if the Company determines it wants to use the same approach with other products. He says other markets are aware of this innovation and have already expressed interest "but ING has been the first Company to back this effort and we will devote our full attention to them in the foreseeable future, of course."
With 125 distinct brokerages using Policy Works, Tec4 has doubled the number of broker staff using its management system in the last two years. It now has in excess of 1300 licenses and has increased staffing to 20 persons. Fifteen are located in Calgary and the rest are in Montreal and Ontario.
Tec4 has also refined a 'strategic integration partnership' with Applied Systems automation solutions in The Agency Manager (TAM) initiated several years ago.
"We've taken TAM integration to new limits as well," he says. "Invoices and abeyances are now automatically created. When you do things in Policy Works, it actually creates data in TAM so it has two-way integration now."
Tec4 recently launched a commercial auto module for broker subscribers in Alberta and Ontario, and has included the availability of the PDF toolkit in Policy Works. It allows brokers to e-mail automobile submissions and their own property submission to underwriters as a pdf without the requirement of launching Adobe outside the management system.
Policy Works also recently completed integration with Power Broker. Finally, Tec4 is working on behalf of one of their clients with Telus Enterprise Solutions and Lloyd's Canada to develop an interface between Policy Works and Lloyd's Lineage portal.
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