It seems everyone would jump at the opportunity to reduce their workload and make more money – but a lot of brokers appear unwilling to take advantage of the technology at their disposal, says one industry insider.
The paperless technology of eDocuments, or “eDocs,” are going mainstream in many of the larger insurance networks, with Economical Insurance announcing that it is making Keal Technology’s CSIO SML eDocs available to its broker partners.
"Brokers now have the task of demonstrating that when carriers and vendors develop these solutions to meet broker needs, brokers will adopt them,” Jorge Arruda, Economical’s senior vice-president of sales, distribution and underwriting operations told Insurance Business. “It is important for brokers to adopt eDocs for two main reasons. The first is to drive cost out of the broker operations and for improved customer service. eDocs makes it more efficient and effective for a broker to implement a paperless office.”
Economical brokerages using Keal’s Broker Management System, sigXP can now fully automate the retrieval and download of electronic declaration pages for personal lines and Individually Rated Commercial Auto (IRCA).
Economical is the first insurer to offer IRCA via the eDocs process, and joins Aviva, Intact, RSA, Portage Mutual, Gore Mutual, and SGI CANADA as companies offering eDocs to Keal clients. (continued.)
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“Automatically pushing electronic policy declaration pages to our brokers is a much more efficient and streamlined process for our brokers,” said Arruda. “There are fewer touches required to get documents into their broker management system where the critical information is readily available to all staff in the broker’s operations.”
For Dario Battista, president of Belpac Capri Insurance, the time savings alone are worth the price of eDocs.
“The Economical/sigXP eDocs process is saving us one hour of processing time each day,” said Battista. “We no longer have to receive paper downloaded from Economical’s portal. Each eDoc is automatically attached to the client file in sigXP, and we only have to look at unmatched exceptions which very rarely happen. We can’t wait for more carriers to offer eDocs, this is giving our staff more time to service our clients.”
The development of this broker management system is an excellent example of the industry working together, Arruda pointed out.
“The industry has worked collaboratively — led by the brokers themselves — and identified the need for eDocs,” said Arruda. “From there, CSIO standards and an agreed-upon workflow were developed. Understanding the importance of this initiative, many carriers and vendors put aside other priorities to develop this functionality, which was a clear demonstration of their responsiveness and support for the independent broker channel."
