Making a Meaningful Connection

If you ask Karl Greenlaw, president and CEO of Brovada Technologies, he will tell you brokers accessing carriers through company Web portals will soon be a thing of the past.

A recipient of CSIO’s third annual achievement award in 2010, Greenlaw believes quoting solution providers and broker management systems (BMS) will become one and the same thing within the next five years. In other words, connectivity between brokers and carriers will become so seamless that policy inquiries, endorsements and new business will be done in real-time, with no portals.

It may not be the single-entry, multiple-carrier interface (SEMCI) solution that brokers have advocated for several years, but it is closer to a “once-and-done” solution promoted by the Insurance Brokers Association of Canada (IBAC).

The CSIO’s award recognized work Brovada has been doing with Pembridge Insurance Company in coming up with a tech solution that allows brokers to do real-time policy and billing inquiry.

Greenlaw explains what he is doing using a baseball equipment metaphor. “We essentially built a catcher’s mitt for [insurance companies] to receive the data that we were sending from the brokers’ side,” he says. “That product would then tie in to their back-end system, their policy admin systems, and then process the transactions we send.”

Basically, the technology “sits on top” of the company’s policy administration system. When a broker sends information to the insurance company, the technology prompts the broker to include any missing information the company’s system requires to process the data coming from the broker.

“We essentially supplement the information in the policy admin system with just enough data, just enough rules, to deal with that potential missing data,” Greenlaw says. “Brokers are then presented with messages saying: ‘Here’s what you need to go back to your BMS and fill in.’ Or, if your BMS doesn’t support it: ‘Here are the fields that are required.’ So it’s more exceptions-based data-gathering.”

After filling in the missing information or fields, brokers click a button. Their data is then processed by the carrier’s back-end system with help from the ‘catcher’s mitt.’ The broker then receives confirmation the system updated the premium. At that point, there is a complete CSIO XML file of the transaction.

That’s an example of an ‘upload,’ a one-way communication from the broker’s BMS to the carrier’s policy administration system. The next step towards the brokers’ coveted “once-anddone” solution is to accomplish the reverse: a real-time download from the carrier’s system back into BMS. That won’t be far in the future, Greenlaw says.

“The industry has been pushing us to focus on the upload, but we are in the process of doing some download trialing,” he says. “That will be the complete IBAC solution up and down. No portal. Less than a year. We’re working on it now.”

This real-time, “once-anddone” solution is a bit of a departure from a true SEMCI model. When the CSIO attempted [and ultimately abandoned] its SEMCI portal years ago, the idea was for all companies to participate in an industry- wide portal. In this model, brokers would submit information through a portal not only to a single company, but several at one time.

Politics, not technology, caused this model to fail, Greenlaw said. Individual carriers were concerned that companies would lose a competitive advantage. They would no longer able to differentiate themselves through technological innovation, with the SEMCI portal

making every company look like generic “sliced bread,” Greenlaw observed. “It’s hard to differentiate yourself when you’re talking sliced bread.”

And so, when the CSIO Portal was abandoned in December 2005, competition ultimately accomplished what co-operation could not, Greenlaw said. “In behind the scenes, some of the companies participating in that [CSIO Portal solution] were figuring it wouldn’t last, and they were starting to shore up their bets on an alternative approach,” he said. “That’s where we did quite well. We came at it from the completely opposite direction. We said, ‘Okay, look, we get it: the broker management system providers and the carriers’ solutions are so disparate that to ask them to [match] would be very difficult.’

“The second thing is, we had to honour the fact that the companies wanted to continue their marketing [to differentiate themselves].”

In answer to this last question, Greenlaw said he realized connectivity solutions would have to provide data interfaces between brokers and companies that allowed carriers to differentiate themselves through marketing, but at the same time they would have to be standards-based in order to process their brokers’ information.

At first, carriers accomplished this through the establishment of company Web portals. But connectivity is now advancing beyond the need for portals altogether, Greenlaw notes. And this all came about through competition.

“We figured the best way to make things evolve toward the real [objective of] the CSIO portal was to do it in a way that you use competition to push the once-and-done solution,” he says. “So if Axa thinks [its broker connectivity] is sufficient, and Royal comes along and says, ‘Well, we’ll do it that way, but we will improve our processes so we’re more standards-based,’ it kept driving technology forward.

“We watched it happen very quickly, where competition drove us to this idea that portals are disappearing.”

And so that makes things interesting for latecomers to the portal technology. In fact, smaller companies that have not yet investigated portal technology — Greenlaw cites mutual insurers as an example — might be well-advised to skip the portal phase altogether. Instead, smaller companies might start developing the next generation of connectivity technology that does not require a portal, Greenlaw says. He adds larger companies that have already invested heavily in portal technology are in an excellent position to gobble up companies that are only entering the portal game at this phase.

All of this theorizing about broker connectivity demonstrates just how far Greenlaw has come since graduating from college in 1994. At that time, he fancied himself an IT entrepreneur who wanted to start his own firm. Fulfilling the dream, he launched Brovada in 2003. Leading up to that point, he had designed a premium financing program intended for use by the used car industry.

When Greenlaw tried to shop his premium financing program to brokers through Keal Technology, Pat Durepos, president of of Keal, commented on how easily Greenlaw’s program connected with Keal’s SigXP product. That was a turning point when Greenlaw turned his attention to broker-carrier connectivity, he says.

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We figured the best way to make things evolve towards the real objective of the CSIO Portal was to use competition to push the once-anddone solution.