SCF Arizona Taps Sword Insurance to Support New Business Model

As a result of new state legislation, SCF Arizona, a provider of workers’ compensation, is currently undergoing a complete business transformation, expanding beyond a state insurance fund to a mutual insurance company, according to Sword Insurance. Sword announced it will provide its software solutions and professional services staff to assist SCF in implementing a new online distribution platform to support the transformation.

Also, SCF will expand its product offering beyond the current workers’ compensation coverage, with regional territory expansion expected in the future. The most immediate change will involve increased focus on the independent agent sales channel.

SCF reportedly sought a flexible technology platform to make it easy for different distribution channels to do business with the company. SCF licensed Sword Insurance’s web-based platform AgencyPortal, the AgencyPortal ToolKit and the off-the-shelf workers’ compensation web portal template. SCF plans to launch new business web rate, quote and bind first, then follow with endorsements, renewals and policyholder self-service using these solutions.

SCF will also utilize Sword’s recently launched Turnstile service to automatically handle new business submissions from agents whose ACORD forms are attached to e-mails. Instead of having to re-key the submission data into one or many systems, the Turnstile subscription Web service is designed to take data from many ACORD forms and convert them into a single stream of ACORD XML, which is then passed to rating, policy and other systems at SCF.

SCF will go live with the new portal in several phases, with internal testing beginning in the fourth quarter of 2011, according to Sword.