Home  |  Support  |  News & Events | Contact Us  |  Français

My Xpertdoc            

ACORD LOMA 2011 – insurance moving forward with new technologies

San Diego California was the scene of this year's ACORD LOMA insurance systems forum annual conference.

Relatively well attended - although a lower number of industry professionals (some 300 if we exclude vendors, consultants, analysts, speakers, etc…) - than previous years, the overall buzz amongst participants was positive and engaged.

The conference sessions covered the usual business tracks for the various lines of business (general, life health & annuity, property & casualty, reinsurance) … But with my personal bias on operational efficiencies and customer experiences, those 2 tracks got most of my attention this year. In the sessions attended and dialogues I had with industry players, there was interesting 'trend', if you want to call it that. There was a higher prevalence of technology in the sessions and people were certainly exploring technology solutions to age-old business problems.

The Lloyds session presented a particularly interesting case of how new technologies are being used to address the issue of providing agents with the full array of documents & files required to book new business without compromising security, while improving the traditional methods that required agents to travel equipped with armloads of relevant client, industry, and business files. Lloyds decided to provide its agents with the iPad technology - taking the opportunity to bring robust tools to theirs agents, and expediting the technology acquisition process along the way! Researching tools this time circumvented the organization's traditional route that required lengthy RFP's, committees, sponsorship, etc. A rapid review of what the users wanted was followed by a quick decision / selection process and then acquisition of the selected tool (iPad).

This combination of listening and delivering to the Business Users' needs in a timely fashion seems to be integral to achieving widespread acceptance across the organization (people still see the iPad as a sexy toy, so having one is associated with a level of prestige) . The rapid adoption of the iPad across their agent community along with rapid results in the market has generated great interest among insurance industry carriers. Clearly the concerns over security and data integrity are still high amongst carriers, but the benefits of reliable access to relevant documents during client communications are starting to outweigh these concerns - especially as systems are starting to address security access parameters.

The movement towards tablets is inevitable. Starting with B2C markets, led by the agents and broker segments, tablets will soon house increasingly B2B applications over the next few years. Xpertdoc has already included document output to tablets in its development roadmap - with beta sites targeted or early 2012.

So a world where agents access their forms on iPads, slates, and other large screen mobile devices is just around the corner! Secure access control over the internet or on the Cloud will provide carriers and MGAs with the confidence required to support the widespread deployment of these tools.

This entry was written by Varsha Bhat posted on May 25, 2011 . Follow any comments here with the feed for this post. You can post a comment.

Related pages


Post a comment