Below is the 11th of 13 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 November 14th event in New York, honor best practices in insurance industry IT initiatives and strategy.
To improve the company’s ability to adapt to rapidly changing business requirements and deploy new underwriting and distribution capabilities, Capitol Insurance, a midsize insurer focusing on specialty niches in commercial P&C, fidelity and surety, and professional lines, replaced their multiple legacy surety systems with a single modern platform, and enabled online self-service for agents.
The project required the conversion of 20 years of bond data from multiple legacy systems, and the deployment of Capitol Express, a surety underwriting portal used by both retail and general agents to automate the bond underwriting and distribution processes.
Capitol implemented OneShield’s Dragon system for policy administration and underwriting, and it also serves as the platform for the agent-facing bond submission and renewal portal, called Capitol Express.
The project took two years, which included a complete business process re-design for the surety business. It required five dedicated IT employees and five additional employees at various times throughout execution. The product vendor, OneShield, provided between eight and 10 resources throughout the project. During user acceptance testing, the surety operations manager and a staff services surety specialist spent almost 90 percent of their time on the project, and an assistant underwriter in each office was assigned to assist with testing and become the local system champion and subject matter expert.
A primary goal was to offer access to agents. In the past, agents would call, email or fax requests for everything, such as quotes, bond issuance, underwriting guidelines, renewals, to their underwriter. Now those capabilities are available 24 hours per day through Capitol Express, and 25 percent of new business submissions and interactions occur online. They also consolidated the surety business onto one system, and back-office processing from four branch offices to one, and Capitol re-entered the contract surety market and in less than seven months they were writing contract bonds.
To see coverage of the other Novarica's Impact Award nominees,
Check back Monday to find out how PEMCO created SmartSearch, allowing CSRs to find customers without exact spelling or policy number, and The Hub, which offers a consolidated customer overview.
About the awards: Novarica’s first annual Research Council Impact Awards honor best practices in insurance industry IT initiatives and strategy. Nominees were selected across four categories—Practice, Quick Hit, Transformation and Expansion—with three nominees chosen for each (a tie in the Expansion category meant four nominees were selected). The nominees were selected by a committee from a collection of case studies drafted by Novarica from submissions by insurers.
The nominating committee included CIOs Andy Wood (Wilton Re), Dan Simpson (Trustmark), Eric Bulis (SBLI USA), Larry Fortin (Millers Mutual Group), Mark Berthiaume (Chubb), Pete Moreau (Amica), Piyush Singh (Great American Insurance Company), Reuben Broadfoot (LifeMap), Sal Abano (Tower Insurance), Stuart Tainsky (PURE) and Tim Billow (ING).
Winners will be determined by votes from the more-than-300 members of the Novarica Research Council, a moderated knowledge-sharing community of insurer CIOs and senior IT executives.
The nominees and winners will be recognized at the
