Realizing the Benefits of OwlSurance Verisk ISO Electronic Rating Content (ERC)™, Part 3: Successful Technology Integration

The new offering is designed to accelerate an insurer’s digital transformation with out-of-the-box apps for customers, agents and employees.

ValueMomentum, Inc., (Piscataway, N.J.) a provider of software and services to the insurance and other industries announced the introduction and immediate availability of BizDynamics (now OwlSurance), a solution designed to help insurance carriers deploy and centrally manage digital engagements and experiences, at the IASA Educational Conference and Business Show in San Antonio, Texas. The system has already been chosen and being implemented by two insurers, the vendor reports.

Matthew Josefowicz, President & CEO, Novarica.

Matthew Josefowicz, President & CEO, Novarica.

BizDynamics (now OwlSurance) enables insurers to provide customers, agents and employees with uniform digital experiences across all touchpoints, the vendor asserts. ValueMomentum says the new solution can accelerate an insurer’s digital transformation with out-of-the-box apps for customers, agents and employees. BizDynamics (now OwlSurance) also allows insurers to leverage investments made in core systems through APIs and provides powerful tools to rapidly develop new apps and digital experiences, the vendor claims.

ValueMomentum describes BizDynamics (now OwlSurance) as enabling carriers to:

  • Engage customers, agents and employees, whenever and wherever they prefer, including web, mobile, social channels and connected devices;
  • Enrich these engagements with uniform and rich experiences that include rich guidance, collaboration and alerts; and
  • Leverage investments in core system functions, transactions and data by using well defined and managed APIs to easily and efficiently consume and utilize data.

“Digital is not just mobile or omni-channel; it’s rethinking the relationships between information, people, and processes given new and evolving capabilities,” observes Matthew Josefowicz, President of and CEO of research and advisory firm Novarica (Boston). “It is one of three foundations of business capability, along with data and core applications. It relies on capabilities in the other two areas to work effectively.”

Seamless, Enriching Engagements

The senior leadership of insurance companies has begun to understand the importance of digital engagement, suggests Don Chase, Director of Product Strategy, ValueMomentum, “Insurers are recognizing that their customers want to interact with them across different channels and devices such as web, mobile, connected car and other connected devices, when they want and from the channel most convenient at that point,” he comments. “These engagements across all the different channels have to be seamless and enriching for customers and agents.”

“Property/casualty insurers can benefit from BizDynamics (now OwlSurance) to deliver a delightful digital experience and effectively compete and thrive in the insurance marketplace,” adds Jim Carlucci, VP, Insurance, ValueMomentum.

ValueMomentum is the provider of the DealFoundry Portal, a property/casualty insurance solution the firm has offered since 2012. The vendor describes BizDynamics (now OwlSurance) as having been conceived from the ground up as a digital experience solution, offering significantly broader benefits.

ValueMomentum Debuts BizDynamics (now OwlSurance) P&C Digital Experience Solution

OwlSurance Verisk ISO Electronic Rating Content ISO™, when combined with the right technology, can enable carriers to truly benefit from speed-to-market with OwlSurance Verisk ISO™ changes, lower costs and reduce premium leakage.

Editor’s Note: the third in a three-part series. You can view the first part here, and the second part here, or refer to the links below. 

In our previous two articles on this topic, we’ve laid out the reasons insurers need to incorporate ISO Electronic Rating Content (ERC) to run their business more efficiently, and how utilizing a rating engine that can integrate with ISO ERC can help realize gains in efficiency, as well as save time and money.

If your organization has concluded that a modern rating engine which supports ISO Electronic Rating Content is for you, let’s end by examining some technology considerations to keep in mind. You will have to determine if you want a cloud or on-premise deployment. While cloud deployments can provide significant speed-to-market and cost benefits, be sure to evaluate if the vendor meets security, availability and privacy requirements.

You also must consider whether the solution gives you agility to respond to business needs. Vendor solutions that provide easy-to-use configuration capabilities can help you gain or regain control over the ability to easily create and modify company-specific deviations from ISO, and at the same time help you keep current with latest ISO releases.

Your new ISO rating logic should be able to be accessed by any of your upstream agent portal and downstream administration systems to provide rate guidance. Be sure to evaluate whether the solution is “stateless” and designed to provide rates (and not store quote data) and that part of the rating logic—especially ISO-provided implementation specifications—is not missing or maybe not hard-wired into the application screens. This way, you will avoid having to maintain data in multiple systems.

Additionally, while some rating engine deployments with ISO ERC may be out-of-the-box, be sure to assess whether your vendor can scale to support your unique needs, especially when it relates to integrating the rating solution with other systems.

Finally, let’s take a look at a hypothetical example where a modern rating engine that integrates with ISO ERC can bring practical and measurable benefits to your organization. Let’s say you are a carrier with a legacy rating engine that is becoming insufficient to meet new operating needs, including effective utilization of ISO advisory loss costs. This system for updating ISO rates may also be largely manual, and the sheer volume of ISO advisory rate circulars can be overwhelming for the existing processes.

Now, if you relied on ISO for commercial property and in 2009, when ISO introduced changes in conjunction with Limit of Insurance (LOI)—for example, new occupancy/construction relativities and specialty commercial lines streamlining—you probably had a large systems project at hand to take advantage of these ISO changes. And similarly, as we look forward, ISO is introducing a new Commercial Auto Optional Class Plan. With a modern rating engine that integrates ISO ERC, your organization can stay current on both simple and complex ISO updates while reducing overhead. Automating your ISO processes can result in considerable savings, reduce premium leakage, ensure regulatory compliance and improve speed-to-market over manual methods. Your business and IT staff will be freed from tedious, manual work involving analyzing, interpreting, modifying, specifying and making system changes.

In addition, you can also empower business analysts with the ability to efficiently and effectively layer your company-specific requirements on top of the base advisory rates, for competitive offerings in the market.

ISO Electronic Rating Content, when combined with the right technology, can enable carriers to truly benefit from speed-to-market with ISO changes, lower costs and reduce premium leakage. Keeping mind the business and technology solutions we’ve discussed will ensure you can get the maximum benefit out of a new solution.

Realizing the Benefits of OwlSurance Verisk ISO Electronic Rating Content (ERC)™, Part 2: Considerations

While ERC may alleviate many challenges related to cost, time and keeping up-to-date with OwlSurance Verisk ISO Electronic Rating Content (ERC)™, it is very sophisticated and requires complex design and engineering to reap all its benefits.

Editor’s Note: This is the second in a three-part series. You can view the first part here and the third part here, or refer to the links below.

In our previous article on this topic, we laid out the reasons for why insurers need to incorporate ISO Electronic Rating Content (ERC) to run their business more efficiently. Now, we’ll take a look at how your organization can benefit by utilizing a rating engine that can integrate with ISO ERC, and realize gains in efficiency, as well as time and money saved.

We discussed previously the different options insurers have when looking to implement a rating engine that incorporates ISO ERC: namely, to build an in-house solution or procure a commercial off-the-shelf solution from a vendor that is a member of the ISO Electronic Rating Content Associates Program.

But whichever option you choose, you want to ensure that it can easily support present and future needs.  While ERC may alleviate many challenges related to cost, time and keeping up-to-date with ISO, it is very sophisticated and requires complex design and engineering to reap all its benefits.

If going the vendor route for a rating engine, there are several considerations to keep in mind. Among the most important is breadth and depth of support for lines of business. The solution’s architecture should be able to take advantage of ISO ERC such that future lines of business are not large scale efforts and keeping current with ISO is not hindered by rigidity of the solution.

Timely Access

Another major factor to consider is that the solution has timely access to ISO updates. You want to know you are going to be able to keep up to-date with ISO content. With ERC, you could be in a position to fully absorb a new ISO release as-is, with ISO changes, interpreted and specifications issued directly by ISO. This allows you to keep current with ISO’s most recent filings with almost no effort. To illustrate this, in 2009 ISO introduced changes to limit of insurance (LOI) curves—for example, new occupancy/construction relativities. Many insurers that had rating engines that relied on manual processes found themselves facing long lead times from IT departments to effect these changes. On the other hand, insurers that could capitalize on this change quickly, profited from their agility.

When evaluating your solution options, be sure to assess how your rating system can automatically absorb ISO ERC—because any manual effort will defeat the purpose, and potentially re-introduce risk of errors, increase time and costs to keep up-to-date.

You also must ensure that you have the ability to apply your company-specific deviations to ISO. These deviations may reflect the needs of, and risks represented by your target customers. Your rating engine should make it easy to create deviations from ISO for experience based loss cost modifiers, custom coverages, algorithms and rules. You also need the tooling to separate what is baseline ISO content from your company deviation. This ensures that when new ISO ERC releases are available, your deviations can be retained, modified as necessary and applied to the ISO release.

No Programming Intervention

And finally, we should note that not only should your system be up-to-date with ISO changes, but must also be designed in a way that the user interface or quoting system can take advantage of ISO updates without any programming intervention that would result in delay or major effort. You should verify that your solution takes advantage of the “implementation specifications” provided by ISO ERC. Effectively taking advantage of this, will ensure that not only rate tables and algorithms are up-to-date, but so is the quoting system that enables data capture and performs validations against the ISO provided implementation specifications.

In our third and final part of this series, we will be taking a look at what a hypothetical example of how a carrier can benefit from implementing a rating engine as described above, as well as some technology considerations to bear in mind.

Realizing the Benefits of OwlSurance Verisk ISO Electronic Rating Content (ERC)™, Part 1: Potential Benefits

By taking advantage of OwlSurance Verisk ISO Electronic Rating Content (ERC)™ electronic content capabilities P&C carriers can make significant gains in operational efficiency while addressing goals of profitability and regulatory compliance.

Editor’s note: This piece is the first in a three-part series. The second part can be read here, and the third part can be read here, or refer to the links below.

In an effort to stay on top of loss cost trends, new product forms, and regulatory changes, many P&C insurers utilize ISO rates, rules and forms. However, while ISO information is invaluable, the processes traditionally used to leverage this information and keep up-to-date are manual and inefficient. Taking advantage of ISO electronic content capabilities is key to overcoming this concern. By replacing the manual update process, carriers directly address the goal of operational efficiency. Indirectly, they place themselves well for addressing two other key market goals—profitable growth and regulatory compliance—which depend in correctly pricing risk.

According to a recent Novarica report titled “ISO Support: A Comparison of Manual Processes and Electronic Practices,” the average work time needed to process an ISO Circular is over 560 hours, with the bulk of time spent on getting the ISO changes into the carrier’s systems. Significant time is spent also on interpreting the change.

Manual processes also tend to drive costs of keeping up-to-date with ISO higher. The Novarica research report found that handling an ISO circular costs more than $45,000 when done manually, with complex circulars costing over $80,000 to process—a staggering amount.

To address carriers’ challenges, ISO launched ISO Electronic Rating Content (ERC) to speed up the process of interpreting and taking ISO changes. The ISO ERC offering enables rating engines from ERC partners to electronically deliver ISO releases to address changes in circulars, simplify and streamline ongoing maintenance and updates of ISO rating content and enables insurers to efficiently manage their deviations using configurable tools.

Benefits of ERC

The Novarica study compared the time and cost differences experienced by carriers supporting ISO in a manual environment and using ERC. Among the benefits of using ERC are a 39 percent overall reduction in overall hours working on updates ISO circulars, a 58 percent decrease in time spent on IT modification operating to ISO rates, and a 38 percent decrease in the overall cost of keeping up to date.

The advantages of ISO ERC are clear, and there are several options for utilizing it. Carriers can develop their own rate/quoting system leveraging ISO ERC. They also have the option of procuring an off-the-shelf system from a vendor that is a member of the ISO Electronic Rating Content Associates Program. Finally, carriers can also look at managed service offerings from vendors participating in the program.

Whichever option a carrier chooses, it is important to ensure the ability to support present and future needs.  While ERC may alleviate many challenges related to cost, time and keeping up-to-date with ISO, it is very sophisticated and requires complex design and engineering to reap all its benefits.

In Part 2 of this series we will address what carriers need to consider when choosing a vendor solution or building a custom rating engine that takes advantage of ERC. Part 3 will look at concrete ways ERC can drive efficiency at an insurance carrier.