The following article was written in association with Applied Systems.
Acquiring a book of business is a complex, time consuming and tedious one. Traditionally, it can take carriers weeks or even months of sifting through data with constant back and forth before any progress is made. Whether it’s down to a merger or acquisition, agency retirement, a shift in focus or even regulatory updates, it’s a painful necessity – but thanks to technological advancements that may all be about to change.
While there are already solutions out there on the market, one new platform is changing the game – it’s the much-awaited integration of Ask Kodiak and Ivans Bookroll from Ivans.
Ivans Bookroll allows carriers to easily receive and evaluate agency data, while Ask Kodiak acts as search engine for commercial insurance products. Speaking to Insurance Business, Kathy Hrach, SVP of product management at Ivans, explained that the integration of the two was born out of market need to address ongoing challenges.
“Carriers voiced an interest in having a marriage of the two products – Ask Kodiak and Ivans Bookroll. This means when they’re doing a commercial book transfer, it’s much easier to determine right away which of those policies fit within their appetite – because a lot of the carriers are having to do that anyway. After they get the book roll data from Ivans, they then have to go through their own system to determine if they’re are interested in all of the policies.”
Now, by combining the two together, carriers enjoy the benefit of knowing exactly which of the book roll policies do or don't fit within their appetite in an instant. As Hrach told IB, this is just the beginning in regards to meeting market demand with new solutions – all the while adhering to a trial, amend and adopt strategy.
“As with all our products, after we release we continue to enhance,” Hrach added. “We're always trying to understand how we can be better, how we can do better. As we're starting to expand into the distribution and the sales side of carriers, we’re creating even more integrations between our solutions. This is just one of many opportunities that we see in the future, [helping] us to continue to provide even more integrations between all of the different Ivans solutions. The [overarching] idea is to provide a true end-to-end, automated process that carriers can manage, while still [reducing] manual steps throughout the process.”
Another of the integration’s biggest selling points is its ability to show carriers a specific percentage point of appetite fit. Carriers will be able to access a high macro view as well as an in-depth, detailed breakdown of what does and does not fit for them.
“We’re also adding a few more bells and whistles to the dashboard,” explained Hrach. “Such as showing carriers their book roll policies state by state - I think it will make the whole process a lot more user friendly.”
Ivans is way ahead of the industry with an integration such as this one – a position they’re committed to remain in. At the heart of their strategy is a desire to make everything that much simpler and streamlined for agencies and carriers – leaving them the time to focus on their clients.
“With commercial lines we’re focused on trying to remove a lot of the steps that exist today. [It’s about] making it easier for carriers to grow their distribution with the right agency partners and vice versa. That's always at the forefront of what we're trying to do.”
From there, Hrach says Ivans is all about making that connectivity easier for distribution – keeping an eye on how to hone the whole process within the insurance life cycle.
“[It begins with] agencies looking to place business – from there it’s about streamlining the submission process, the appetite, and understanding which carriers to place business with” added Hrach.
“[At Ivans] we’re also trying to make it easy to connect that back to binding the business and downloading that information back to the agency - so the whole cycle can continue to repeat. Our long-term goal, both from an Ivans standpoint as well as with Applied, is to make the process of agencies and carriers in an independent agency channel work easily together. It just makes both sides that much more effective and competitive – meaning they can provide better service to their clients.”
