According to Paul Zamora, vice president in charge of underwriting for the Workers Compensation Division, improved workflows couldn’t be implemented quickly enough. The product is sold to carriers, Primes says, but because it leverages ACORD XML standards to push and pull data from an agent’s desktop into the UMS, it benefits both carriers and agents by reducing duplicate entry.įirstBest’s first customer was ICW Group Insurance Companies, a San Diego-based super regional representing a group of multiline property and casualty insurance companies providing workers compensation, surety, earthquake and personal and business auto insurance. The agent knows he’s not wasting his time by submitting a risk that will be declined.” “There is clarity around what kind of business the carrier is looking for. And the UMS can be customized and branded to a specific carrier.įirstBest preconfigures the UMS, she says, so it includes the carrier’s risk appetite, along with the pre-qualification questions and supplemental questions. Additionally, the FirstBest UMS collaboration tools include notes that flow directly into the online workspace and point to the item needing clarification. “It allows complete visibility into any part of the submission process at any time,” Primes explains. The result is a fully managed offering that enables real time collaboration between agents and underwriters. “They would ask: ‘If you had a magic wand and you could create an underwriting or collaborative system that could do anything you wanted, what would it look like?’” (As a side note, Primes indicates that FirstBest still conducts these magic wand exercises with customers in an effort to continuously improve the product suite.) “Over a two-year period they did about 100 ‘magic wand’ exercises with representatives from large and small agencies, carriers, and industry consultants,” she says. They were aware that the commercial lines underwriting process had too many manual, redundant procedures and too few effective tools for communication between underwriters and agents. “FirstBest is focused on the commercial underwriting process in a more holistic way.”īefore the company was even formed, Primes says, the founders did extensive research. “A lot of organizations have tried to apply technology to the underwriting process, but their efforts usually focus strictly on the carrier workflow or the agency workflow,” she points out. She explains that FirstBest was founded in 2006 with a mission to “transform the commercial lines electronic underwriting process. That FirstBest has achieved these accolades in relatively short order shouldn’t come as a surprise, Primes notes. It eliminates the back and forth phone calls or e-mails.”ĪCORD and IASA have applauded the efforts of FirstBest and honored them with the Innovative Implementation Award and the Technology Achievement Award, respectively. The agent and the underwriter can each access the system from wherever they are and have the application open at the same time.
“Let’s suppose that the agent has a couple of questions about sections of the carrier’s supplemental application. “We do this by providing a ‘virtual room’ where the carrier and the agent can work together on a piece of business,” she continues. “So rather than making agents and underwriters follow a tightly scripted sequence of screens and pre-ordained content, an Underwriting 2.0 approach such as our UMS encourages genuine interactivity, a nonlinear workflow, as well as the ability to add your own content.”Īdditionally, with an Underwriting 2.0 approach, producers, CSRs, and underwriters can all work together on a shared process-in real time.
“It’s a collaborative business system,” explains Meira Primes, vice president of marketing for FirstBest. What does interactive information sharing via the Internet have to do with insurance? It’s the basis for what FirstBest® Systems, Inc., is bringing to the marketplace with its Underwriting Management Systems™ (UMS)-a commercial lines electronic underwriting solution. If you told your kids (or grandkids) that when they spend time on Facebook they’re actually collaborating with their friends using Web 2.0, they’d give you “that look.” But that’s what social media applications like Facebook offer-interactive information sharing via the Internet.
FirstBest Systems enhances agent/carrier electronic collaboration for commercial lines
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