Over the last 25 years a great deal of attention has been paid to making the personal lines and small commercial lines sales, underwriting, accounting, and claims processes more efficient. Medium and large commercial lines have not been under the same pressure to achieve high levels of efficiency.
On the other hand, some producers are frustrated at the dearth of tools to help them manage their sales and submission projects. Dealing with paper files, FAXes, e-mail, and so on is a mess. Some risk managers look for more order in their relation with their agents and brokers. And even medium commercial account customers want to be more a part of the insurance process, with some direct access through the Internet.
Collaborative software
Insurance software generally falls into one or another commonly recognized categories - comparative rating, agency management, policy administration, forms, and so on. Collaborative software is a new category, not widely understood, and not yet seen as a critical business tool for handling medium and larger commercial accounts.
Most insurance technology, the categories listed above, are for the use of one business entity only, such as an agency. We could call this general family of software, single-entity software. Single-entity software is intended to make an entity self-sufficient by storing a complete set of data and providing the functionality to get the day's work done. Sometimes single-entity software systems communicate with one another via interface, but for the most part they act as isolated islands of computing.
But business in general and insurance in particular is not a single-entity process. It involves customers, agents, carriers, and others. Collaborative software is software that allows people in multiple business entities and/or geographically separate locations to work together on a common project. Collaborative software is shared across business boundaries and makes it possible for a project group to be much more efficient than they would be working through conventional but unmanaged communication (e.g., e-mail, FAX, and so on). Collaborative insurance projects might include creation and management of submissions, management of complex or protracted claims, re-insurance negotiations and so on.
Riskclick collaborative software
Riskclick is an ASP (application service provider) that provides hosted collaborative software to the insurance industry. Typically an agent, broker, or risk manager subscribes to the service, sets up projects, and then brings business partners on to the service.
Here's how it might work: Bob Johnson, principal with the Deer Harbor Insurance Agency subscribes to Riskclick and is then provided access to the Riskclick Web site. He sets up accounts for the four agency producers. They, in turn, can set up projects (and teams) for any insurance process they find relevant.
For example, Bill Smith, a producer, may be working on acquiring the Deer Harbor Resort and Marina as a client. He knows that its insurance needs will be complex, require collecting a great deal of information from the prospect, involve submissions to many carriers, demand filling out and handling many forms, and generally require day-to- day management of all the people and pieces involved.
So Bill goes to the Riskclick site and creates a project area for the resort. He then sends an e-mail to the resort's CFO telling him about the Riskclick site and how to log into the resort project area. The e-mail might then go on to describe which forms on site the resort needs to fill out, how to upload spreadsheets, digital photos, and other files, how to attach e-mails to the project, and so on.
Once the resort has finished its entry and Bill has added his part, Bill e-mails carrier underwriters to whom he believes he'll want to submit all or part of the case. As with the resort, he explains how to sign on to and use Riskclick and have access to the marina project. Bill sets up security on the marina project so that he can see all the information, but the marina can't see the underwriters' activity, they can only see the parts of the project that are relevant to them, and they can't see each other.
As the underwriters begin to review the submissions that come to them, they're likely to request additional information or an additional form. They make their requests and provide the forms through the marina project on Riskclick. Bill picks up the requests and then prepares the material or requests the marina to do it.
Given multiple lines and multiple carriers, perhaps a dozen submissions are involved, each requiring many question-answer round trips. Over the course of the submission project, hundreds of e-mails and scores of forms and attachments will be requested, tracked, edited, and sent on. It's a complex process. And it's exactly what Riskclick is intended for.
Riskclick makes it possible for a producer to manage complex multi-carrier submissions with direct participation of the prospect. The prospect can be kept up-to-date, preparing and handling the information they know best. Underwriters are provided all the information they need, on-line, and in a very organized and systematic way. The producer can keep track of the whole process without breaking a sweat. And the agency owner(s) can monitor sales/submissions cases and know that they're being conducted according to best practices and with forms established by the agency.
Though Riskclick is especially adept at facilitating the commercial lines submission process, it can be useful for managing any process that takes more than a few steps or involves more than one person (inside or outside the agency). Riskclick can be useful managing claims processes, for instance.
Riskclick details
Riskclick identifies six major areas covered by its service: collaboration; document management; audit trail; contract formation; straight-through processing, and decision support.
Collaboration is the creation and interaction of ad hoc project-based teams with members from multiple organizations. Document management is the tracking and versioning of hundreds or thousands of electronic files (Word, Excel, PDF, JPG, e-mail, etc.) By the way, in one clever application of technology, Riskclick allows FAX machines to be one source of digital image files. Thus an insured needn't have a scanner to get a paper document into a Riskclick project space, they need only a FAX machine and the ability to use it.
Audit trails can be difficult to create and maintain in the unmanaged environment of e-mail, FAXes, paper mail, and so forth. In Risk-click, every file is digital and part of a comprehensive environment with systematic version stamping. Riskclick is especially good at helping prepare, submit, and track placement and claims transactions.
Riskclick is active in the ACORD XML process and has assigned two employees to be part of the commercial lines working group. Riskclick uses Adobe (PDF) as a forms platform, applying the ACORD XML standards to tag forms data. That makes the forms "intelligent," with the potential to feed other software without the need for re-keying.
Besides its collaboration support infrastructure, Riskclick also offers forms, templates, and decision support content from Business Insurance, Financial Times, Griffin Communication, IRMI, Maxima, RiskMetrics, Rough Notes, Screaming Media, Standard and Poors, and Treasury. Riskclick reformats the content and otherwise makes it accessible within its environment to producers, for instance, looking for background information
At the moment, Riskclick isn't integrated with any agency management system. Though Riskclick doesn't have a great deal of overlap with agency management system functionality, it could be useful to have a single place to manage customer/prospect interaction. As with other cross-entity ASPs (e.g., certificate systems), Riskclick does a better job than conventional, island-of-computing solutions for its specific focus, but it creates another problem for agencies - how to deal with and manage multiple systems that all touch the same customer.
Riskclick background
Riskclick was founded by Marsh and Booz-Allen & Hamilton emigrants. It's been funded by Banc of America Equity Partners and Amadeus Capital Partners. Riskclick management has deliberately stayed away from insurance industry funding in order to retain its ability to serve the industry evenly and neutrally. Riskclick has a presence in Europe (London) as well as North America in recognition of the increasingly global nature of the insurance business.
I had a chance recently to talk with Gordon Surbey, Director of Business Development, and James Moore, SVP of Marketing/Knowledge Management, out of the New York office. Surbey reported that though the dotcom meltdown may result in a lower valuation for their next round of funding, it's also had the effect of weeding out potential competition. What would happen to an agent's data if Riskclick were to go belly-up or the agent wanted a divorce? Surbey assured me that all data and documents stored in Riskclick would be made available to the agent; nothing would be lost.
What's the real value-add of Riskclick? Why should an agent be interested? What's the one crucial point Riskclick wants to get across? According to Surbey and Moore, it's difficult to identify just one specific focus. In one sense, Riskclick is the successor to e-mail, a useful though difficult to manage platform for insurance collaboration. It can reduce or eliminate overnight mail fees.
Riskclick appeals to different people for different reasons. For some agents or brokers, Riskclick holds out hope for substantially improved commercial lines sales and submission efficiency. For others, the idea of bringing the client into the process has great appeal - both to please existing clients and to differentiate the agency from others for new business. Others see E&O, coordination with brokers, or internal efficiencies as key reasons for adopting the technology. Riskclick can put smaller agents and brokers on the same playing field with their larger cousins, providing them infrastructure that heretofore only the largest brokers could afford to develop.
It's important to distinguish Riskclick from an Internet-based exchange. It's more general and more flexible. It facilitates the insurance process, but does not explicitly provide markets or insurance coverage the way some exchanges attempt to do. Exchanges may help place a specific risk, i.e., they provide a solution to a specific problem. Riskclick, on the other hand, is about how to do business. It changes the way an agency operates.
Riskclick is hosted by Navisite, one of the big names in managed hosting. Navisite provides physical security and requisite firewalls. The Riskclick application uses
typical name/password user authentication and 128-bit SSL encryption, but offers an RSA token system for authentication as well. Under the token scheme, the user is given a credit card device with a small LCD screen. The screen displays a new number periodically. When the user wants to signon, the user keys in the current number on the "credit card." The on-line system verifies that the keyed number is currently valid and the user is allowed into the system.
Riskclick subscriptions are priced by user, not by activity or transaction. Prices range from $200 per month per user down to $35 per month depending on the number of users per agency.
Where to look
If you'd like to improve the way you handle submissions and other virtual team projects, it's worth your while to look into Riskclick. They've got a good Website with a slide show demo that helps explain their service and how it works. A case studies section suggests how Riskclick can be applied in various risk environments. Both can be found under "Solutions" off the home page. You can find Riskclick at www.riskclick.com.
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