Canada’s property and casualty insurance industry has made a big move towards a paperless, electronic exchange of policy documents between brokerages and insurers.
Aviva Canada announced it has launched a rollout of e-Docs for use by its brokerages across the country. The process is compatible with all four Canadian broker management systems (BMS) that provide eDocs support – including Applied Systems' TAM and Epic; CSSI’s The Broker Workstation; Keal Technology’s sigXP; and Zycomp Systems’ PowerBroker.
Using the Centre for Study of Insurance Operations (CSIO) XML standards, the Aviva eDocs process automatically sends electronic policy documents from Aviva directly to the client file in the broker’s BMS, integrating seamlessly into the brokerage’s workflow.
Aviva and Wawanesa Mutual Insurance Insurance Company were first out of the gate in terms of a wide-scale rollout, brokers say. But other companies have offered eDocs in specific territories or through individual broker management systems.
“Virtually every major insurer is either live, testing or building e-Docs right now,” said Rick Orr of Orr Insurance Brokers Inc. “It is truly remarkable how when the industry sets its mind to it, an industry wide solution can be delivered in about 18 months.”
The quick turnaround belied the amount of work that was required to make it happen.
“It was a significant effort for us,” said Elan Satov, vice president personal lines underwriting enablement at
Aviva Canada. “End-to-end, it probably took about six months of work…
“One of the biggest challenges was collaborating with the four different broker management system vendors to make sure that everything was set up properly and that it would work. It had to be a collaborative effort in order to be able to offer it [widely].
“For us, being dedicated to the broker channel, we wanted to make this available to all of your brokers across the country. We didn’t want to do it just piecemeal. We wanted to make sure that everybody had access to it.”
The insurers’ initial release of eDocs is for policy documents, although it can ultimately apply to claims and billing documents as well.
For Aviva Canada, the rollout of eDocs follows the company’s mandate to reduce costs associated with paper transactions between brokers and insurers on a client’s file. And to the extent that it creates efficiencies for brokers, that can only help the companies as well.
“The biggest thing we get is exactly the same thing that the brokers get, which is creating capacity in a broker’s office,” Satov said. “If there is a lot of time spent on manual processing of paper or a document, this frees up time for the brokers to spend more time with customers, providing advocacy and advice. They are serving their customers better; they are our customers, too.”
The idea of eDocs first came up in a February 2012 committee meeting of the
Insurance Brokers Association of Canada, Bryan Yetman of First Durham Insurance & Financial said. Brokers then publicly pitched the idea to insurers at the October 2011 Convention of the Insurance Brokers Association of Ontario (
IBAO).
In May 2013, Aviva set up a pilot with the four BMS vendors and 17 brokerages in Alberta, Ontario, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and Quebec. One month later, Aviva announced the rollout of a national eDocs solution serving thousands of Aviva brokers across the country.
“From being discussed on some industry committee to being delivered inside two years, I think that’s pretty amazing,” said Yetman.
