Earlier this month, Novarica announced the winners of the ninth annual Novarica Research Council Impact Awards. These awards recognize insurance technology projects that demonstrate real business impact and are selected by insurer CIO members of Novarica’s research council.
Over the next several weeks, we’ll be taking an in-depth look at each of the eight winning case studies. This week features Merchants, one of the winners in the digital category.
Merchants developed an online quoting system to support a new line of business, which it integrated with its legacy back-end system via APIs. The system led to a 250% growth in completed quotes, nearly doubled the number of agents using it, and enabled straight-through processing over the course of a two-year deployment cycle.
Integration was a particular challenge for this project. Merchants needed to make sure the new digital portal could integrate with its legacy system and produce standard ACORD forms, which required a specific implementation of JSON. In addition, the project used Agile methodology, so Merchants had to adapt its standard testing processes and make sure communication with business sponsors was consistent and clear.
One of the most fundamental ways to create value with technology is by selling more. Many insurers have yet to explore the internet fully as a sales channel.
As I mentioned last week while discussing Everest Re (another winner in the digital category), there has been a consistent theme among Impact winners over the last five years. At least one winner in the digital category every year has been an insurer that had created a portal or quoting platform.
Creating new online portals or quoting tools can increase sales volumes by streamlining or automating processes. Insurers can do this even when integrating to legacy back-ends, as Merchants has shown.
Digital capabilities aren’t just about enabling omni-channel or mobile. Digital means rethinking the relationships between information, people, and processes given new and evolving capabilities, designing user experiences and workflows across channels, or leveraging existing and new data sources and analytics to streamline processes and improve experiences.
Case studies for all winners and 20 other IT projects that Novarica considered for the Impact Awards appear in this year’s Insurance Technology Case Study Compendium, and more than 100 case studies from the last five years are available in Novarica’s research library.
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