Portal service not competition for CSIO, say vendors

Developers of a new insurance company “portal” service say their product is not competition for the Centre for Study of Insurance Operations (CSIO) broker-insurer portal, and will in fact be compatible with it.”Most insurers have pieces of or are in the process of building, or are budgeting for building, their own company portals which will allow their brokers to perform many different functions – including policy issuance and change, check financial status of accounts, etc.,” says John Savage, president of Compu-Quote, which has co-created “collabor8” with iter8 Inc. “Collabor8 is a product which is intended to be a third party alternative for companies to acquire – versus building it themselves or going to other vendors who build this type of technology.”He says the technology is close to “plug and go”, that is as opposed to solutions that insurers are required to “build” for themselves. “Not only does collabor8 not compete with the CSIO portal, it also provides carriers with pre-built interface for the CSIO portal and any other industry wide portals live today or forthcoming in the future,” says Glen Piller, president of iter8 Inc.The claim that the product would provide functionality more quickly than other portal projects was not intended to refer to the CSIO project, they say, but to other web portal initiatives insurers are currently involved in or considering to provide.