Brovada turns 10

The arrival of 2013 marks a special milestone for Brovada as we celebrate our 10th year. Over the past decade we have seen many changes and are thrilled to have become the leader in the connectivity space in Canada. What started as a small New Brunswick based company has proudly grown to serve over 950 brokerages and 40 insurers while processing approximately 80% of all the real time traffic between Canadian carriers and brokers.

For me the last 10 years have flown by (literally). Since the beginning of Brovada I’ve maintained Super Elite status with Air Canada. To attain Super Elite one must fly a minimum of 95 times or attain 100k miles in a given year. I’ve always accomplished this feat by having over 95 flights. That’s an average of almost two flight segments per week. Super Elite benefits do make flying easier to endure but I’d definitely rather be home than away. With most of the insurers based in the larger metropolitan cities it has been a challenge to find time at home in Saint John, New Brunswick. Technology has helped bridge the gap by allowing meetings to occur virtually but when it comes to relationship building nothing beats a face to face meeting.

Like Brovada, the insurance industry has changed substantially over the last decade. Most Brokers would never have anticipated the switch in consumer buying habits to change so dramatically. What made brokers strong in the first place was the client relationships that were forged. The broker was an active member of the community and the community supported them. This relationship has been under pressure in the last couple of years as consumer buying behavior has shifted to favour lower-cost over higher-service. As community-focused as they may be, consumers have started to look to the lower cost options.

As many brokers make moves to adapt to the changing landscape they must retain the characteristics that made them what they are. Relationships. As long as the price spread between direct writers and insurers is within a certain range customer service, reputation, visibility and knowledge become essential tools for success. Technology can reduce the price gap and for all of the other differentiators it just comes down to good leadership and a solid team. Direct writers have no advantage beyond price and when it comes to sheer frontline underwriting capability a broker that knows their customers should have a strong advantage over a web-based/call-center interaction.

I’m very proud of the innovation that Brovada has brought to the marketplace and hope that it will continue for years to come. I know it would not have been possible without the support from our customers, colleagues, and friends; and for that I want to thank you all.

For those of you attending the Insurance Canada technology conference in March we will be celebrating Brovada’s 10th year at our hospitality suite. I hope to see you there.

Disrupters – leading edge companies that are changing the game

Three trends in the software industry will fundamentally change the agent/broker management system (AMS) business. These trends will be considered disruptive, not only because they will dramatically alter the way things are done going forward but because traditional processes will disappear almost overnight.

Companies that have embraced these trends are known as disrupters. The disruption, although potentially negative to current software design, distribution, and support, will most likely be a boon to agencies/brokerages looking to improve their technical prowess and reduce their cost overhead.

The three trends are:

Open Source – Essentially open source refers to the public availability of an application’s code base. It encourages the participation of others to enhance the app’s current functionality and benefits from the contributions of others. Contributors can include both independent developers as well as professional development companies. There are varying licensing arrangements and, usually to ensure a high degree of adoption, a foundational base code is available free of charge. Many companies have successfully adopted open source as a lucrative development model, growing their products through a network of contributors, and generating revenue through product support and custom development.

App Stores – Apple Inc. has single-handedly changed the way we purchase products. With applications being sold ‘en masse’ and at ridiculously low prices, software vendors are being forced to reconsider their traditional pricing, development, and distribution models. Initially many of these apps were fairly rudimentary and developed by ‘arm chair developers’. That approach has since shifted with more and more apps being developed by organized development companies who generate significant revenues from low-cost, high-volume sales.

This shift away from traditional distribution and pricing is similar to previous disruptive changes such as the move from Mainframe to PC based applications as well as the more recent change from PC to Web based development. Both of these changes caused enormous opportunities for new market entrants as it reopened monopolistic positions held by software providers in each of the disrupted development paradigms.

Cloud Computing – This technology involves the hosting of software and data in a web-based environment. As opposed to a locally-stored application, which may reside on a personal device or PC, cloud-based applications are available through a web browser and benefit by allowing access from a range of devices (e.g. phones, tablets, or traditional PCs). Some cloud computing is architected with locally residing applications that simply access data stored in the cloud while others are completely cloud based. Most cloud-based offerings have a free component to entice user adoption (e.g. set amount of free online storage) and charge for additional functionality, storage, or number of users. Many of these services generate revenue from other sources (e.g. advertisements) that allow them to provide cloud access as a free service.

Cohesively these three trends fit nicely together and complement one another. They allow companies to profit by: leveraging the open-source development pool, distributing and collecting revenues via online app stores, and appealing to a larger audience by eliminating the dependency on local hardware and applications, while at the same time, becoming more portable. This is not a far-fetched futuristic model; these three trends are successfully changing the world of application development. Disrupters such as Apple, Salesforce, Google and Red Hat, which have pioneered these trends, are highly successful.

So how does this affect insurance and more specifically the AMS systems space?

Simply put, there are companies out there today applying these shifts to the insurance software industry. It may take some time to unseat some of the bigger AMS providers but it will happen. Many of those bigger providers have struggled to implement newer technology over the years and have fallen behind. Even vendors that think they are cutting edge are actually using old technologies and stubbornly following a paradigm of ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’.

Newer systems will provide better mobility out of the box, lower overhead, and the ability to efficiently manage ongoing costs. They’ll be available at a fraction of the cost and will have less dependency on local hardware/software.

So what does this mean for existing providers? They will be supplanted faster than they could ever imagine. For a period of time the larger agencies/brokerages will require the stability of their existing solutions but, before long, the benefits of the disruptive trends will outweigh the risks. Existing vendors will try to become disrupters and will need sound leadership to adapt to the changing development landscape.


Here are a few disrupter companies; just as you can only see a small portion of an iceberg above the surface, you can assume there are many more companies following suit. In these cases, the smaller vendors are both more nimble and less reliant on complex processes, giving them the advantage when trying to transform themselves.

Ajunt – Ajunt is just about to launch and they appear to be focused on the app and cloud disrupters. Their app is free and cloud based. From the limited amount of information on their website I’d predict they plan to make money through support and add-on apps. However we won’t know until they go live.

Agency Matrix – They have an extremely low price of $90/office and are also cloud based. New features are added free of charge.

[Confidential] – Another vendor is looking at transforming their business into an open source model where anyone can use and modify their source code. They, like other open source companies, plan to make their money through support agreements and custom changes. I’ve seen this product in action in Canada and it should be interesting to see this disrupter once they proceed.


In the end, the traditional software development and distribution model is being turned on its head. The disruptive trends will continue to exert pressure on companies forcing them to either adapt or lose market share. In this model, the agent/broker wins by getting better technology that provides more effective ways of competing with the direct writers while reducing expenses.

The Proof is in the Pudding

We’re about to break through 100,000 NexCenter transactions a month and there seems to be no end in sight to our formidable growth.

With the recent addition of Wawanesa for inquiry, new business, and endorsement upload – along with new business functionality for The Dominion, Pembridge and Grenville Mutual – our transaction numbers will see another substantial increase over the coming months.

Currently 700 brokerages across Canada use NexCenter with 40 different insurer systems. As the only provider of endorsement upload to company systems, we have been and will continue to be the innovation leader. Based on the numbers there is no other upload solution that comes close to our functionality or adoption.

NexExchange, our product for insurers, is now represented in over 20 installations across the country. It provides a complete connectivity solution for insurers including modules for system conversions, broker book rollovers, back-end integrations, web services and EDI functionality.

Our streamlined portal alternative module, which won the Insurance-Canada.ca 2011 Best in Class award, takes a different approach from the traditional transactional portal which typically requires 15-20 screens (or more) of enterable pages and extensive navigation by the user.

Our approach is to provide a ‘once and done’ solution, leveraging the information entered into the BMS, and reducing the broker interaction to a single page of enterable data to address company-specific questions. One page versus 20 reduces the average upload time from 3½ minutes down to 90 seconds. That’s a measured and substantial efficiency gain with several of the brokerages equating the time savings to 2 person days per month for each company that supports this approach.

For those companies looking to invest in a traditional portal there are a number of options including Sword Insurance’s AgencyPortal™ and iter8’s collabor8. Though traditional portals in the right environment do have merit, the message from brokers is loud and clear that they don’t want to work in them. This leaves our approach as the best and only solution on the market.

We will continue to deliver great innovations over the coming months and years. Areas of growth will include: comparative rating, claims (current support for FNOL), book of business management for brokers, integration to property evaluation, and claims inquiry services to name a few.

Our projected growth will see NexCenter surpass 800 brokerages and 200,000 monthly transactions within a year. More insurers are in the process of announcing NexExchange streamlined portal projects and our focus is clearly set on delivering.

I truly believe that Brovada is the leader in insurance connectivity. I also believe that we’re only as good as our reputation and the solutions we provide. Being at the top makes us an easy target for others to mimic and rally against but we encourage the competition as it forces us to remain nimble and responsive to your changing business needs. At the end of the day we rest our success on the success of our products. As they say… ‘The proof is in the pudding’.