Below is the 5th of 11 Novarica Research Council Impact Award nominee case studies that INN is presenting, in no particular order. The awards, which will be presented at the research and advisory firm’s August 21st event in New York, honor best practices in insurance industry IT initiatives and strategy.
Erie Family Life Insurance set out to streamline the life insurance sales process and make it more intuitive to the independent agents who are used to selling the parent company’s personal lines P&C products. The resulting system and product, known as ERIE LifeSense, combines an electronic application with e-signature capability, a real-time underwriting decision engine that integrates multiple components to provide point-of-sale automated underwriting, and straight-through processing (STP) to a policy administration system from three different vendors.
Before achieving a point-of-sale approval rate of around 50 percent, a 10-point improvement to placement ratio over other products sold, and an average time to close new business of 15 minutes, Erie Family Life found that in order to overcome business challenges posed by the project, it needed to simplify the application form, finalize the rules for immediate decisions and ensure a paperless electronic enrollment process.
The means to this end included iPipeline’s iGO eApp, eSignature, and STP. It also used RGA’s EASI real-time underwriting decision platform powered by AURA and Dell’s LifeSys, Agent Web Portal, STP and policy administration.
Novarica’s Take: “Erie synthesized all the right components to streamline their life product offerings from sales to issue. They’ve seen dramatic improvement in the ability of their primarily P&C channel to drive life sales, due to this new capability,” said Rob McIsaac, Principal at Novarica.
