Commercial Commitment

The Centre for Study of Insurance Operations (CSIO) has made excellent progress over the last year on meeting the objectives detailed in its three-year strategic plan, launched at the start of 2012. Efforts included supporting commercial lines advancements and helping improve commercial lines efficiencies in the broker channel.

Improving efficiencies of the broker channel is the core of the CSIO strategic plan, which defines the organization’s key objectives. These include the identification of four strategic pillars designed to deliver on a number of new measures to move beyond the maintenance of standards and forms. CSIO is committed to providing members with increased standards implementation support, facilitating collaboration to determine industry best practices, and identifying new technology initiatives.

Targeted efforts seek to meet ongoing and emerging challenges, including those in commercial insurance. The importance of commercial insurance cannot be underestimated in the broker distribution channel. Today, Canadian brokers have a commanding commercial lines market share of 91%, but direct writers have been looking to capture a greater share of this market.

Although the erosion of commercial lines business to direct writers has been much slower than personal lines, brokers still need to reinforce and protect their commercial books of business with workflow efficiencies and technology advancements.

Directs have been able to develop harmonized systems of data collection through significant investments in technology. Using CSIO standards and forms, brokers can harmonize data collection and delivery without such a significant financial investment. Because most brokers have access to multiple insurers and trading partners, they can even achieve this harmonized data collection on a much larger scale than directs.

“Often on the broker side, you have a number of different companies that want their own specific forms, but having one comprehensive form that encompasses all the information you’re looking for is very helpful and streamlined for the broker,” suggests Jennifer Soper, director of corporate underwriting at Northbridge, one of the largest commercial insurers in Canada. “The client would then only have to complete that form once, rather than multiple forms from other companies. CSIO forms give us the ability to make sure what we use outside of CSIO is current and comprehensive,” Soper says.

EXPERT VIEWS

Over the last year, CSIO has been working on bringing key industry experts with the right expertise and knowledge to its working groups. The idea is to ensure consistent implementation of standards and forms across the industry.

These volunteers have been vital in bringing key industry concerns to the table and ensuring standards and forms are kept up to date. This is especially true in the commercial market, where less regulation exists than in personal lines, allowing insurers to ask their own set of questions, which can cause inconsistencies and inefficiencies.

Soper points out, “When we do receive CSIO forms as part of a package from brokers, the staff here at Northbridge are comfortable that we participated in structuring those forms as part of the membership of CSIO.”

The expertise of working group volunteers, coupled with a focus on commercial lines, allowed CSIO to release seven commercial forms in 2012, and another three significant commercial forms to date in 2013.

Beyond that output, CSIO has also implemented a number of changes to speed up the standards-development process, including changing the working group format from an in-person meeting to a web conference, allowing for increased participation and a national presence. 

ENHANCED COMMUNICATION

The new commercial forms come with a new mode of delivery, meant to enhance communication of standards and forms releases to members. In line with its key value to be proactive in recognizing industry challenges, CSIO has worked with volunteers to ensure the latest emerging trends are addressed in its standards and forms releases.

This is reflected in CSIO ’s decision to send out releases with enhanced communications that clearly outline highlights. In this vein, CSIO has been developing webinars and videos to educate members on the benefits of consistent implementation of standards and forms across the industry.

Though consistency is a goal, it is essential that CSIO standards be flexible enough to be adapted to a variety of business contexts. It is through this flexibility that standards have contributed to important emerging trends in the commercial insurance market.

The use of insurance-related mobile applications, for example, is becoming increasingly popular with customers in both personal and commercial lines. Policy Works used CSIO standards to develop its innovative Producer app — the industry’s first commercial lines mobile app — which helps brokers prospect for commercial insurance policies in the field.

“The Producer app is the first mobile implementation using a data set based on CSIO standards. Having the standards in place is largely responsible for where we are in commercial lines connectivity today as an industry,” says Kevin Campbell, president of Policy Works, which develops commercial management systems for the Canadian insurance industry. GREEN ASSETS

CSIO’s recent form releases also speak to another emerging trend in the commercial market: eco-friendliness. More and more customers are paying attention to the environmental reputation of companies when making their purchasing decisions. Brokers need to be able to protect their customers’ all-important green assets, which are increasingly becoming key elements in a business’s competitive success.

CSIO incorporated green aspects into the new Commercial Insurance Application, released in May, including questions about green roofs and use of alternative energy, such as geothermal, solar and wind.

Eddy Chung, forms analyst at CSIO, facilitated the effort needed to simplify the commercial forms, which had a lot of overlapping elements, and to reduce duplication. “Instead of duplicating our efforts, there was a call to thoroughly investigate these sections and reuse them in various forms for consistency and ease of implementation,” Chung says of the working groups.

At the Commercial Insurance Application working group, for example, “everyone came together and decided the entire liability/casualty portion of the form should be replaced by the revised CGL application.”

SMART FORMS

Another of CSIO’s strategic pillars is to deliver leading-edge technology standards and solutions for the broker channel. One such innovation is the smart form, which holds the potential to allow CSIO members to capture data more efficiently and accurately.

Commercial lines could benefit the most from implementing smart forms because this line of business still relies heavily on manual processing of industry applications.

Beyond data capture, CSIO forms will also allow members to quickly identify errors and omissions in forms using data validation rules and can be extended to easily integrate form data with enterprise databases and applications through XML standards.

CSIO plans to continue working on the release of new commercial forms in 2013, including the Inland Marine, Builder’s Risk and Contractor’s Equipment Applications, the Crime Insurance Application and the Welding Warranty Application.

CSIO has also initiated a project on another technology solution that will benefit commercial lines, eSignatures, which promises to enhance customer experience by enabling straight-through processing. “With eSignatures, the ease of electronically sending an application to a client, having them complete it and then having them attach an eSignature to i t and send it back to the broker will definitely speed up the process of getting information to and from the broker, and then to the company,” suggests Soper.