APRIL 20198IN MY OPINIONIn today's busy world, we are all bombarded with communications through email, snail mail, text, voice calls, social media, and face-to-face visits. We can easily become overwhelmed with all of the information, but even worse, disconnected information that must be rekeyed into other systems creates a huge time waste and loss of profitability.The chaos in the Insurance Industry is no exception. From a technology viewpoint, if you consider that there are thousands of insurance carriers using different systems and different processes that must be supported by hundreds of thousands of different agents, you would quickly realize that the need to streamline information flows and work processes are essential for survival. Compound that with increased consumer expectations requiring real-time responses from multiple carriers for rate comparisons on very complicated contracts that are not truly comparable, you would recognize the importance of standardizing and automating information flows to allow consumer and agent and carrier systems and other third-party interfacesto talk together and transfer critical information without the need to for duplicate and triplicate data entry. Together as an industry, we now can securely transmit confidential documents between Carriers and Agents through the implementation of Activity-Notes transactions which batch large documents together and are automatically attached to the appropriate client in the Agency system. Claims information download from the Carrier ensures that Agents have critical updates to a Client's claim status, and the Agent can upload First Notice of Loss, and together the Carrier and Agent are better able to serve our mutual clients. Policy information is able to be securely downloaded from the Carrier to the Agency systems for almost every policy type. We have Real-Time Rating upload capability for Personal Lines and now Commercial Lines. This is very helpful for Agents because the thousands of pieces of information on a risk application do not have to be re-typed into individual Carrier website raters, since through real-time rating, the information already residing in the Agency system is electronically transferred into the Carrier system saving time, energy, and reducing errors. Independent Agents represent many carriers, and it is quite inefficient Pulling the Pieces Together in the Insurance IndustryBy Angelyn Treutel Zeringue, CPA, President, Southgroup Insurance Gulf Coast Angelyn Treutel Zeringue
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