Broker Advocate

When Ted Harman was 18, he was a franchisee running a restaurant in Montreal, with no ambitions to enter the insurance industry. Today, he runs Accent Insurance Solutions while also serving as a member of Insurance Brokers Association of Canada’s (IBAC) technology committee, as secretary-treasurer of the Quebec brokers’ association, Regroupement des cabinets de courtage d’assurance du Quebec (RCCAQ), as vice-chair of the Centre for Study of Insurance Operations (CSIO) and as president of the Concordia Brokers Association.

“I have a full-time job and a challenging part-time job,” Harman says. “You need people to step up and take a position, and advocate for different things and help move the industry forward,” he suggests. “I think that’s something we’ve been working very, very hard at, on different levels, for all of the organizations that I have been involved with.”

One initiative intended to move the industry forward is the ongoing effort to develop computer systems that allow brokers to send transactions from their own systems to those of carriers without having to re-enter the same data into insurers’ portals.

What brokers want, argues Harman, is to be able to work from their work management platform, input information and data into their broker management systems, and transmit the information they need to do new business entry, policy changes and process renewals to insurers.

By day, Harman is the president of Montreal-based Accent Insurance Solutions, which he acquired almost 12 years ago when it was known as Assurances Senecal Inc. Beyond property and casualty, the company offers other financial services, including life insurance, annuities and banking through Manulife Bank. About 65% of its insurance business is personal lines, while 35% is commercial.

One risk for Harman’s homeowner clients in Quebec is earthquake. “In the next 60 days, we expect to be writing to every one of our homeowner policyholders to sensitize them specifically about the earthquake issue, and to strongly suggest to them that they add earthquake shock to their policy,” he reports.

“My personal lines clients and a number of guys that I play hockey with will make a joke that, ‘Ted’s always talking about earthquakes.’ But the day after an earthquake in Quebec, I don’t want people calling me saying, ‘Why didn’t you suggest this coverage to me?'”

Natural Resources Canada has estimated that within the next 50 years, there is a 5% to 15% chance of a major quake in the Ottawa/Montreal/Quebec City region. Harman questions if one should bet the total equity on one’s home “to save somewhere between $15 and $30 a month on your insurance premium.”

WORK AHEAD

The importance of helping others become informed is likely to continue being part of Harman’s ongoing association and organization work. Having been secretary-treasurer of RCCAQ since November 2007, currently into his fourth two-year term, he will step down in November 2015 in line the group’s four-term limit.

Knowing the significant time commitment that working to become RCCAQ president-elect would have entailed, he has opted to focus on his work with CSIO and IBAC. “I find the work that I do with the CSIO and with IBAC sufficiently rewarding that I didn’t want to step away from the other responsibilities that I have.”

For example, IBAC’s technology committee is facilitating work on computer technology that will essentially allow broker management systems (BMSs) to communicate with insurance carriers’ systems.

“Different insurers have been paired with different BMS vendors to try and speed up the process so that the work that’s accomplished between the BMS and the insurers can be templated over to other insurance companies,” Harman explains. “It can speed up the process of implementing an interface between a particular BMS and the different insurers that are participating in the process.”

As for CSIO, the organization is certifying IT vendors and carriers for eDocs, a standard designed to let brokers download policy documents directly from a carrier’s system to their respective BMS, and to store those documents without manual intervention.

CSIO has a calculator that lets brokers figure out how much money they can save by using eDocs, Harman says. “In my brokerage, the expectation is that it will save us $20,000 per year,” he reports.

“When you extrapolate $20,000… across the country, the amount of benefit that is generated across the broker network is substantial. It’s millions of dollars in cost savings. I think that it is very, very, very beneficial for the broker cause,” he adds.

It is a cause Harman continues to support, although he did not start out as a broker. In fact, insurance was never on his “radar screen” as a career choice.

From Montreal originally, Harman’s wife moved to Toronto in 1984 to start a new job as a teacher. He joined her after graduating from Concordia University with a commerce degree in 1985. (He has since also earned a Master of Business Administration.)

Harman started looking for work and got a job in claims with Progressive Casualty Insurance Company, which sent him to Ohio for six weeks of training. He then spent two years as a road adjuster in Toronto.

“To my mind, there is a shortcoming in our industry about communicating to high school, college and university students about the level of opportunity that exists in the insurance business. It’s something we need to work on in a more co-ordinated and concerted fashion.”

Harman and his wife later moved to Ottawa, where he took up new duties as Progressive’s senior marketing representative, responsible for Eastern Ontario. He remained there until 1989, when he joined Baxter Structures for a two-year stint, and then moved on to Zurich Canada in 1991 as manager of services.

Still with Zurich Canada, he and his wife moved back to Montreal in 1994. In 1997, he joined ING Canada (now Intact), the last carrier he worked for, as vice president for the Montreal region.

Harman then decided to make the switch, which also represented a return to the past. “I decided to launch myself into the insurance brokerage side,” he says. “In the past I had been an entrepreneur.”

Harman had worked for a small Montreal restaurant chain for two years when he was 18. “They had been having problems with a franchisee at a particular place and they asked me to take over the restaurant for them, which I did,” he says.

“When I first became a broker in Montreal, I was approached to sit on the board of the Concordia Brokers Association, which is the association that represents English brokers in Montreal,” he says. Through one of his contacts, he became active with RCCAQ.

“The entire idea for me was to be able to give back to the brokerage community,” Harman says. “It’s something I feel very, very strongly about.”

One way to give back is to advocate for technology standards to help brokers be more efficient. “I don’t think that any insurer would allow their staff to work the way that brokers have to work today, where you have multiple company platforms, where you are working in four, five, six or seven different company portals and having to manage passwords for all those portals, and having to learn and navigate through seven different systems,” he says.

“The ultimate goal is to be able to work from a single work platform that will make us more efficient. It’s more than a laudable goal. I think it’s a necessary goal for our industry,” Harman says.