Negative Campaigning Continues

The Canadian and US elections are over. Unfortunately, a lot of negative campaigning lingers on.

In political election campaigns, when parties start pulling ahead they often find themselves contending with attacks and false accusations. These days Brovada is facing this challenge. Frankly, it’s an honour. It speaks to the fact of how much ground we are gaining. However some persistent falsehoods need to be rebutted.

Accusation: Brovada only uses screen scraping.
FALSE Screen scraping as defined by Wikipedia is “a technique in which a computer program extracts data from the display output of another program.” We utilize structured interfaces such as APIs. These APIs provide access to the broker’s data in a structured way. Interfacing to the insurer goes through the preferred web services or by way of client-side scripting. What does that mean to the Average Joe Broker? Not much. This approach is shared by our Nexisys competitor.

Accusation: Nexisys doesn’t support endorsements.
FALSE Nexisys has automated real time endorsement upload. We also support endorsement inquiry which is widely viewed as endorsements but we classify them as manual endorsements because the broker still is forced to re-key information. For our current endorsements Brovada uses a scripting approach but in the near future we will be providing these through web services.

Accusation: Brovada doesn’t use the CSIO standards.
FALSE Our solutions do use the CSIO standards to ensure the data is in a consistent format. When using web services the data is: first standardized to the insurer’s version and implementation, then transmitted to the insurer, then retransformed into their system format. When a scripting approach is used, the standardization of the data is still required but the data is processed into the web portal from the broker side of the transmission directly into the system format.

Our simple goal at Brovada is to provide solutions that are needed by the industry we serve. We love competition and we love challenges; it’s what gets us up in the morning.

So what can you expect in the new year as we continue to vie for your vote?

Quoting and binding new business from your broker system directly into insurer systems without the use of portals (as we’re already doing in Quebec), piloting of endorsements without portals in Quebec, and many other new connections to insurer portals.

Nexpedite, coming early in the first quarter will completely change things. Nexpedite is a great leap over anything available and we expect it will be the deciding factor in our race to win your vote.

Let’s ring in a happy New Year’s together. Season’s Greetings from all of us at Brovada.

It’s The Endorsement, Stupid

“It’s the economy, stupid.” That famous phrase won Bill Clinton his presidency, focusing attention to the most important issue of the time. Replace that with ‘endorsement’ and you have the urgent issue brokers are now bringing to their vendors.

Endorsements and inquiries account equally for about 80% of all policy transactions yet while new business and renewals supply revenue to the brokerage, they do not. With brokerages facing aggressive competition from direct writers and their more tech savvy counterparts, they need to address their productivity shortfalls.

Brovada’s Nexisys solution has been used for several years by brokerages wanting to address productivity weakness. Over 300 brokerages across Canada enjoy Nexisys’ features: password management, inquiry, new business, and endorsement automation. An inquiry can be processed in 5 seconds and an endorsement that previously took 15 minutes now takes a mere 3 minutes. All from the click of a button in the broker’s system.

So the endorsement automation issue is resolved right? Wrong! Although over 40 systems are accessible for inquiry and single sign-on and several companies have new business upload capability, so far only one company – AXA – has implemented endorsement automation.

The phenomenal number of endorsement transactions processed by Nexisys begs two questions: why aren’t other insurers providing this feature and why aren’t more brokers using the product?

More and more brokers are requesting new functionality from their insurers. Unfortunately the more vocal ones haven’t tried Nexisys as their integration solution. These brokers are demanding password management and inquiries that, although successfully implemented in Nexisys, suffer significant shortfalls in other integration solutions.

One of their key arguments against integration is that brokers do not want to work in a company portal. I would be the first to agree that portals are a stopgap and not the best solution for integration with a company.

However insurers have invested a lot of money into portals and will be reluctant to abandon them. Fortunately, when processed using technology like Nexisys much of those concerns are eliminated.

Brovada designed Nexisys to be very versatile so that it could work with a web service (which requires no portal) and with a portal in an automated way.

In Quebec insurers bypassed the portal concept instead focusing their attention on providing the preferable web service approach. Currently, quoting and binding are provided real time from the brokers system through comparative rating solutions like Brovada NexQuote.

Future releases will see endorsements deployed without portals. Insurers outside of Quebec are making moves in that direction but it will not happen overnight.

Brovada will continue to provide portal solutions until that day arrives and when it does happen we will be the best positioned for the changeover.

Since we haven’t been able to get other insurers to provide automated endorsements using Nexisys like AXA we knew we had to find another way of progressing. So, like any innovative company, we pushed ourselves to come up with a solution. Then we had a Eureka moment, the kind where you not only tip over the apple cart over but wonder why you hadn’t done so sooner. The answer was simple: build a community.

By giving brokers the ability to build their own real time connections to their insurers’ portals, they could: control an important part of their business, see their productivity increase dramatically, and eliminate the wait for companies or vendors to provide endorsements, new business, and inquiry transactions. These brokers would all be part of a common community in which the end goal is to eliminate rekeying of data and make portals more efficient.

This marked the birth of our latest product for brokers: Brovada Nexpedite. Look for it this fall. More information will be provided on our website as it becomes available. Oh and by the way, when Bill Clinton was in office the US had unprecedented economical growth.

Smiles are free

Do you remember when McDonald’s had free smiles on their menu? I remember asking my mother why they would put that there. She said they wanted their customers to know that they really cared about providing good friendly service.

I haven’t looked at their menu board for quite a while but the next time I visit, I’m going to check to see if it’s still there. My guess is the smiles are either gone or the employees forgot to read it. As you’ve no doubt noticed, customer service is lousy these days. I’ve really found over the last 10 years that it’s taken a dramatic change for the worse. Why it’s happening I’m not exactly sure but one thing I do know is that we deserve better.



As a vendor of insurance products, I find that brokerages and insurers have come to expect the same poor service from most of their software providers. Some vendors take 30 days to respond to support calls or emails, others go out of their way to make their data difficult to access, some even threaten to lock down their databases, and one vendor has moved their development and support south of the border. 



Brovada was formed to solve problems like these. For instance, 5 years ago brokers were being asked to work within an insurer’s portal. Although these insurers provided the portals to improve service, it was viewed as offloading work to the brokers. Many insurers quickly partnered with solutions such as Nexisys to automate the keying of data. Other insurers, slower to provide similar features, are now expediting the adoption of these products. 



Yet there are still some that have no roadmap to provide similar functionality. These insurers will eventually notice a dramatic decrease in volume. When one considers that a modern day broker competes against a direct writer – such as a bank whose annual IT investment is more than all the P&C carriers combined – the broker can’t afford to deal with an insurer providing such poor service. 



Brovada recently put on a wine and cheese event in BC. The purpose of the event was to gather feedback on improvements to our products, assist our clients in understanding how to utilize our products to their fullest potential, and to simply say thanks for being a client. The event was a great hit and we look forward to doing more functions like that in the future.



I was astonished by the reaction to our event in BC. It was as if the audience was in shock. They couldn’t believe what their vendor was asking of them: to participate in shaping the tools they needed, to push us, their vendor, to do more, and to engage in improving their productivity. All of this with a glass of wine, some cheese, and best of all free smiles. 

Who wants cake?

Five years seems to have flown by. Brovada’s inaugural year coincided with the birth of my second child or my princess as I refer to her. I find that as she has grown over the last 5 years, Brovada has grown in similar ways.

Being a second child, she benefited from having parents already seasoned to help her grow. Likewise, Brovada benefited from following in the footsteps of the CSIO portal. Armed with the lessons learned by the industry in this first attempt, this was when we joined the race to provide real-time broker connectivity.

The portal's pitfalls, shortcomings, and eventual demise showed the industry that in order to realize real-time connectivity a successful solution would need to be less grandiose, able to bridge political and technological differences, and incrementally implemented.

Brovada successfully developed Nexisys utilizing this strategy and this product has since been adopted by over 250 brokerages and over 40 different connections to insurance company systems. Although the portal eventually ended it served an important step towards the seasoned real-time connectivity industry we enjoy today.

The need to have competition was one of the greatest lessons learned from the portal. From the competition came new innovations, improved transaction workflows, and cost effective solutions. Brovada has thrived in this environment of competition. We uniquely provide real-time endorsements, completely automated uploading, commercial and personal lines transaction support, and provide the base Nexisys product free of charge to our brokerage customers.

The last 5 years has been great and we’d like to thank all of our customers for making our success possible. I’m honored to have built up close relationships to a wide variety of respectable individuals in the industry within both insurance companies and brokerages alike. These relationships provide me with an invaluable knowledge of the pulse of the industry.

As we start into the next phase of our growth together I would like to use this forum to provide this information in a way that will better inform you as to how the industry is evolving, the effects to you and how we will assist you in harnessing these changes. In other sections of this newsletter you will receive information about our latest product changes or additions, helpful tips on using our products and other informative items. Please provide any feedback you may have to improve this newsletter. We hope you enjoy this service and we look forward to providing it to you on a monthly basis.

No one loves a birthday party more than my princess so as I finish this article and prepare to head home I’m reminded that having told her this morning that it was Brovada’s birthday that I need bring home a cake tonight. She’ll be expecting it :) Being 5 years old is great!!