Goodbye to portals? No, but less manual entry is on the way

An industry-wide, seamless real-time connectivity solution for the Canadian P&C insurance industry could be rolled out by 2027 Q2, says Kathryn Sinclair, president and CEO of The Centre for Study of Insurance Operations (CSIO), a data standards body for Canada’s property and casualty insurance industry.

Sinclair made the comment at the Insurance Brokers Association of B.C.’s AGM and Leaders Conference, held in Kelowna, B.C., on June 8.

Does this make insurer portals redundant? asked Aly Kanji, CEO of brokerage InsureLine, noting insurers have invested a lot of money, especially in the last few years, on their own systems and portals.

“No, it doesn’t. And it’s an important question; it’s a critical question,” Sinclair replied during a broker connectivity session. “This isn’t going to remove portals, but what we’re looking at is, how do we get that information in the portal without necessarily a broker doing that? How do we leverage technology to move that information around…?

“Portals serve an important place, and there will be some transactions that you may not be able to exchange real-time,” she said. But most transactions will be put through this new gateway, or ‘superhighway,’ Sinclair said.

CSIO’s proposed industry-wide solution will keep the broker’s system of choice in place, such as the broker management system (BMS). The broker will enter the information into the BMS and request a quote, but the insurer response will come back into the BMS, Sinclair explained.

“The premium will come in, the underwriting messages will come in, and basically keep the broker inside of that system and not have to jump to the portal to enter information for a majority of other common transactions,” she said.

One hall into the superhighway

CSIO would essentially be the intermediary in the connection between brokers and the carriers, as Sinclair described it. “What we’re looking to build is us in the middle…” Sinclair added. “We want brokers to connect once, insurers to connect once. So, moving from all the individual connections to one overarching connection to CSIO….

“What we’re proposing is that instead of the BMS making all those individual calls to all the insurers, we’re saying one hall into a superhighway, let’s call it…And then we [CSIO] would make the call onto the insurer system and bring back the information.”

Which transactions would be involved in the process?

Sinclair said CSIO looked at high-volume transactions. As the national data standards organization, CSIO first looked at personal insurance — habitational and automobile for quote and bind, and then small commercial. The goal is to eventually scale the system “beyond the quote and potentially the bind,” Sinclair said.

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For example, most day-to-day personal lines transactions wouldn’t need to go into a portal and would be transacted within the BMS, then there would be variances.

“We kind of follow an 80/20 rule, I would say,” Sinclair said.

Industry-agnostic

The solution is intended to be industry-agnostic. But what if insurers and vendors don’t want to participate?

When CSIO started down this path about six months ago, they looked at the customer experience and then the broker experience, Sinclair said.

“If the industry doesn’t move ahead with this model, what does that mean? I think it’s going to be harder for brokers to scale,” she said. “I think it’s going to be more difficult to grow the broker channel, to bring more premium into the broker channel, provide that customer the experience that they want…

“You need to have the industry come together to advance a solution,” she said. “The solution will not advance [with] the participation of a couple of insurers and BMS vendors. It has to be across the industry.”

Added Kanji: “When you call your broker and you’re on hold, and your broker is trying to process information and move multiple systems, we’re not easy to do business with. And that’s what has to change.”

CSIO is working with insurers to share the business plan. Over the last six months, CSIO has been working with what she calls ‘stakeholders’ to address security concerns and transactions, the broker experience, etc.

“We’re at a place right now where we actually did a demonstration environment,” Sinclair reported. “We work with participating BMS vendors and insurer systems, and did a connectivity of this solution to be able to present that to show we can meet the industry needs….That actually just concluded about a week ago. And where we are at is proposing to insurers to hopefully get their commitment to move forward.”

Time is of the essence, Sinclair said, but she expects industry participation.

“It has been positive to date…,” she said. “We’ve had key stakeholder sessions that have gone hours and hours in length…”

Once CSIO gets industry commitment to move forward — hopefully within six to eight weeks, Sinclair said — they expect an approximately six-month build stage and testing before it rolls out in 2027 Q2.

“We really do need broad representation,” she said. “We don’t want more fragmentation, and that’s what the solution is looking at solving.”

Jason Contant

Jason has been an award-winning journalist with Canadian Underwriter for more than a decade, including the past three years as associate editor and, before that, as digital editor for seven years.