.jpg)
Sure, artificial intelligence, telematics, and Lemonade’s Policy 2.0 can grab the attention of insurance professionals any day, but it’s the industry-wide remodelling of management systems that’s perhaps the most relevant technological change affecting brokers in their day-to-day work.
Back in February, Economical Insurance launched Vyne, a new policy administration system that improves the accuracy of quotes, offers up-to-date documents with wordings that the average customer can actually understand, and streamlines contact between the broker, carrier and customer, along with other features.
Now, Vyne has launched in New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island for personal lines and individually rated commercial auto, and is coming soon to a province near you, if you’re in Ontario, Nova Scotia, Quebec, and Alberta.
When the Economical team was developing the product, enhancing both the broker and customer’s experiences, rather than simply implementing a new system and integrating existing products into it, was one of its guiding principles.
“We tried to flip it the other way and say, what is it that consumers really want to get from their brokers and then what do the brokers themselves want to get from a carrier, like Economical, how can we support them to do that?” said Tom Reikman, SVP and chief distribution officer at Economical.
The second goal was empowering the brokers to transact on a “once-and-done basis,” added Reikman.
“So, when they have that customer on the phone or through email, that they’re not having to spend a significant amount of time going back and forth between Economical and their broker systems, that they are enabled to very much be able to go onto this system and quote the policy, bind the policy, and issue the policy within a matter of minutes, not hours or days,” he explained.
In the past, a broker could get a quote that would be inaccurate to start with and when they tried to process and bind the policy, it would be flagged by an underwriting team at the carrier, which means it would have to be reviewed, then brought back to the customer – a cycle that went on for way too long to be effective for the broker or their client.
“We tried to build everything into the system so a lot of the pain points have been reduced or eliminated. We’re incorporating a lot of third-party data in for example, which limits the amount of information the brokers have to go back to their customers on. We built out a broader product offering so now they can bundle everything together under one policy, so you can write your home, your auto, your snowmobile, your vacation, your trailer, your motorcycle, your ATV, your watercraft – all that can be bundled under one policy or customer account,” said Reikman. “In the past, to initiate any billing changes or transactions, you had to go through a customer contact centre. Brokers can now make all billing changes and updates on the systems themselves.”
It’s the brokers that have been the catalysts of change when putting the components of Vyne together, and feedback came from provincial and national broker associations as well as brokers and what they wanted to see in the product, according to the SVP. The process of creating the system involved a lot of initial insight from consumers groups, too. Only after gathering extensive insight did Economical move forward with building the system.
But there’s no ‘I’ in team, and this project was no different. Reikman shone a spotlight on the help that Economical and Vyne got from BMS vendors and suppliers.
“They’re the intermediary between the broker and the company, and the support we got from them was absolutely fantastic and we’re really pleased with how we worked together,” he said.
