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.