What's New in Cybertalk?

by Jean Gora
November 1999

Note: CyberTalk is a column that appears monthly in LOMA's Resource, the magazine for insurance and financial services management. To see more contents of the magazine and to see how to subscribe, click on
Resource.

Web-Enabling MGA Services

Slowly but surely, insurance companies are beginning to compete with one another on the basis of the quality of their electronic service delivery. This competition has become most intense in the group pension and managed healthcare markets, where large corporate customers have made it clear that they will do business only with insurers that can provide high-quality electronic services.

Because managing general agents (MGAs), brokers, and independent agents tend to be small enterprises, they have not always had the leverage to make such demands. Those that place business with four or five very large insurers have had particularly little ability to affect the quality of electronic services they receive from the carriers. Many MGAs are themselves technologically unsophisticated and so have not had the knowledge to demand services that would ease their operations.

Until recently, carriers were not under great pressure to improve the situation. This situation is about to change as some leading-edge carriers develop MGA-oriented Web-based services. This issue of CyberTalk describes one such service, the Fieldlink extranet developed by Royal & SunAlliance Financial, the Canadian subsidiary of British insurance group Royal & SunAlliance (RSA).

Systems and Service Problems

The problems MGAs face are compounded by the fact that many insurance application processing systems remain mainframe-based, with each product line using a separate system. Thus, even when an MGA deals with a carrier online, he or she has to access several different systems to get a comprehensive view of a customer’s relationships with the company.

MGAs typically generate business for several insurers, and each of these insurers typically provides the MGA with terminal access to their mainframe systems. The net result is that an MGA may have a wall of terminals, each provided by a different company. While the MGAs may have wished for a common interface to all companies, the companies themselves did not have any particular incentive to provide it to them.

Insurance companies that wanted to develop services for their MGAs also faced a problem. The MGA channel was not their only distribution channel. Their other channels had other requirements, and the cost of developing a single system that could serve all channels was high. The cost of developing separate systems for each channel was even higher.

The Extranet Solution

Royal & SunAlliance Financial’s Fieldlink extranet provides solutions to many of these problems. Fieldlink was built on DWL Unifi, an Internet software architecture developed by DWL Incorporated, a Toronto, Canada-based firm with offices in New York, NY, and close ties to the insurance industry. Fieldlink serves the company’s MGA network. In the future, it will be extended to serve the company’s regional office network. Royal & SunAlliance Financial recently acquired the MGA distribution channel when it purchased Gerling Global’s block of Canadian individual life policies.

CyberTalk recently spoke to three members involved in developing Fieldlink: Darin Stahl, Director, Management Information Group; Thom Hopkins, Vice President of MGA operations; and Melissa Jarman, Marketing Analyst, MGA operations. All were enthusiastic at the way Fieldlink has improved service for the MGA operations.

The company’s typical MGA represents a number of insurance companies. Some represent far more—in one case, 40 to 50 carriers. Because the Gerling business was recently acquired, Royal & SunAlliance Financial had been communicating with its MGAs by telephone and fax, a process fraught with delays.

Fieldlink uses a Web interface and provides real time access to Royal & SunAlliance Financial’s internal systems. An MGA can access it anywhere at any time through the Internet. The Web interface is intuitive; users do not require training. The real time link has dramatically improved the process of issuing new business.

An MGA who wants to notify his/or client when the company has issued a policy can find out about a new issue immediately after it happens. The first Fieldlink release allows MGAs to search the client database and to make pending and in-force policy inquiries. A second release will allow them to obtain marketing forms, premium history, and policy history. Royal & SunAlliance Financial sees this as an ongoing development and plans to build on the functionality for underwriting and customer service as well as the MGAs and Brokers.

The Fieldlink Design

MGAs had a role in designing Fieldlink. Royal & SunAlliance Financial surveyed them to learn what features they wanted and in what order. The company also held several internal meetings on the design of screens and the structure of the system. A steering committee is now in place to determine future development priorities for Fieldlink.

The DWLUnifi product serves as a universal presentation layer that integrates data and business logic from databases, back office systems and data warehouses, and gives them a customizable Web interface. This approach appealed to Royal & SunAlliance Financial because it allowed them to build an architecture that could support, with minor modifications, all of Royal & SunAlliance Financial’s distribution channels. The approach also enabled them to make only minor modifications in their back end application processing systems. During the whole seven-month development process, the Royal & SunAlliance Financial team had to spend only three weeks linking transactions to existing back-end applications.

One feature of Fieldlink has proven particularly popular with Royal & SunAlliance Financial MGAs: its ability to offer—through a single screen—a unified view of each life insurance customer’s relationship with the company. Through the previous terminal system, an MGA or broker might have had to access up to nine separate legacy system screens to view a particular customer’s product profile.

Fieldlink includes security features that continually monitor user activity to validate users on an ongoing basis. Users of the product are able to view and use only those features of the system for which they are authorized.

The Developer’s Background

Formed in 1996, DWL Incorporated creates and markets transactional Web-based applications and customer-centric systems for financial services and retail-consumer goods companies. The privately-owned and venture capital-funded company has experienced rapid growth, with more than 75 employees, a significant portion of whom come from the insurance industry. Its president and CEO, Justin LaFayette, formerly worked for NN Financial, an ING company.

Three-quarters of the company’s revenue comes from insurance, with the remainder coming from the retail and consumer goods industry. DWL relies on its experience in retail and consumer goods to assist insurers in building online brands. Many insurers have no experience in creating effective online brands. Some are not yet aware they need this skill set; others are completely unfamiliar with the concept. These brands will be particularly important as Internet-based distribution rises.

DWL’s services include marketing communications, interface design, and strategic business consulting as well as online branding and custom application development. This set of skills differentiates it from companies that focus exclusively on technology. Clients benefit because the systems are intuitive, require minimal if any training, and support their brand image in an online environment.

Technically, DWL Unifi represents a high-level application services architecture incorporating user interface management, content management, security control, and control of user IDs. This architecture allows DWL to develop mission-critical Web applications—like Royal & SunAlliance Financial’s Fieldlink—rapidly. DWL Unifi works with all major databases and legacy systems. DWL also bundles some of the most common business applications executed in DWL Unifi into product packages. The company also has a complementary product line, DWL Identifi, an enterprise customer relationship management system that integrates closely with the back office. Together the two product lines offer insurance companies a consolidated Web interface or portal for all of their e-business initiatives.

DWL has clients throughout North America and the United Kingdom, including companies such as Canada Life, Royal & SunAlliance, Sun Life Assurance Company of Canada, The Body Shop Canada, Revlon Inc., and Avon Products Inc.