4 Insurers Take Home Innovation Awards

Selected by the partners at Strategy Meets Action (SMA), Amica Mutual Insurance Company, Great American Insurance Group, Oregon Mutual Insurance and Western & Southern Financial Group took home 2013 SMA Innovation in Action Awards during its annual SMA Summit at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Boston.

The insurance strategic advisory firm launched the annual award program to inspire, share and recognize solutions that enable an insurance company to move beyond modernizing and optimizing to real innovation and transformation. The program spotlights insurers and solution providers that have successfully implemented solutions that best leverage next generation technologies such as mobile, analytics and big data, social, cloud, collaboration, or telematics, or that reflect the spirit of innovation that is taking place.

“The quantity and quality of submissions were again remarkably impressive – with a significantly higher number of nominations this year,” said Karen Furtado, SMA partner. “Innovation is indeed happening in our industry, and the progress that is being made by capitalizing on next generation technologies is amazing. The resulting innovation is impacting the industry in many dimensions.”

SMA recognized Amica Mutual Insurance Company for its incremental transformation of the claims experience based on a modern claims management system. Using GIS capabilities, appropriate action can be initiated, rather than waiting and reacting when probable claims situations occur, SMA said. Costs have been reduced and customer satisfaction has significantly improved.

Great American Insurance Group (GAIG) received recognition for demonstrating innovation on a reasonable budget and without taxing existing resources through its iLab initiative, which takes IT employees away from their everyday jobs for six weeks, and gives them several broad challenges. The culture for innovation that has been established is not only incenting new and innovative solutions, it is creating an environment where ideas are valued and employees are encouraged to improve every process and interaction, SMA said.

Oregon Mutual Insurance used a cloud-based approach to achieve rating accuracy and speed to market. The results show what an energizing impact modern technology can have on an entire organization – yielding greater accuracy and the insight that enables informed action, SMA said. Speed to market is driving a better result as well as increased satisfaction.

Also taking home an award, Western & Southern Financial Group has developed a collaborative needs-analysis and fact-finding tool that demonstrates how the effective use of next generation technologies can improve productivity and accuracy. A very personalized approach to improving the communication of detailed, subjective information has increased sales and made the user experience for the client and the agent much more engaging and exciting, SMA said.

SMA also awarded IT solution provider Xpertdoc for its solution for forms and template migration. Xpertdoc offers a cloud-based, patent-pending solution for forms and template migration.

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