Karl's Corner

The Proof is in the Pudding

2011-05-10T10:44:00.000-07:00

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’.

Technology a cometh, says the man in the sky.

2010-11-24T13:27:00.000-08:00

I reluctantly received an iPad as a birthday gift this year. Reluctant because I felt it was a bit too pricey for an oversized smart phone. Two days later I’m comfortably writing this blog post at 35,000 feet and wondering if the day is coming where I could just do away with my laptop.

Technology changes quickly and the rate at which the public has adopted the iPad shows us just how quickly.

Sure there are a few apps that would be better suited for a laptop; but the presumption that you need a full-fledged PC with the usual Windows software is becoming false. And with the upcoming release of decent Windows tablets from companies such as HP I may find life on the road technologically perfect.

I've challenged my network administrator to assist me in making my old files work on my iPad as seamlessly as possible. It’s been a great success so far.

It got me thinking. If this technology can make my life as a traveling CEO (Salesperson) easier, it could also benefit other insurance professionals: the producers taking applications from prospective clients, the traveling executives who need information quickly and efficiently, and the business development staff reviewing statistics and other data with their brokerages.

It’s funny how we tend to resist change but once we’ve let down our resistance we can no longer imagine living without it. If only Apple could make a transporter machine like in Star Trek. Beam me up Steve Jobs.

On another note, I'm thrilled with the response to our portal alternative, NexExchange. We're implementing with more and more insurers everyday. Brokers that have seen piloting with existing insurer implementations have been amazed by the simplicity and ease of use NexExchange provides them. We expect brokers will flock to these once-and-done implementations as we announce new releases over the next few months. If you run into me I’ll be happy to show you what we’ve been up to. I’ll just pull it up on my tablet.

Technology Champions, Eh!

2010-06-01T11:01:00.000-07:00

As Canadians many of us suffer from an inferiority complex when it comes to advanced technology and processes. We feel that anything technically superior must come from the US, Asia or Europe. I myself have always regarded Silicon Valley in California as the center of the proverbial IT Universe and when it comes to the world of insurance, London would be the center.

I’ve done a substantial amount of travel over the last little while that included stops in Silicon Valley and London. Yes the volcano grounded me there but I could think of worse places to be delayed. While meeting with prospective partners and customers it became very clear to me that Canada is in fact leading the charge in many areas of insurance technology. It was also very clear that these countries are envious of our ability to harness technology. We found solutions to problems that they couldn’t even fathom.

In the UK, there is a lack of, and non-adherence to, technical standards. The CSIO standards, along with products like ours, provide a major foundation from which real time transactions – such as endorsement and new business upload – can occur. It’s all too common to see Brits still slogging through paper. And the systems are very disparate from one another which have allowed the personal lines business to all but disappear for the agent channel.
South of the border there is a lot of misinformation on what occurs and from what I’ve learned we are much more advanced in Canada. Comparative rating is done, in most cases, by the agent keying individual quotes into insurer web portals. In some cases the rates are provided in real time directly to the rating engines but these are few and far between.
Also, there is no real time automated endorsement uploads as we’ve had here since 2005 and for that matter new business usually consists of portal intervention.
Portals are seen as the ultimate solution for once and done but here we are implementing portal-free solutions that simply validate the agent data and request company specific information that allows the agent to work from within their system without having to learn yet another portal.

I said to my wife on our way home that travelling is great for experiencing other cultures and societies and learning more about ourselves by understanding how others view us. The global insurance industry sees Canada as being quite advanced and we should be proud of that. Canadian modesty prevents us from bragging too much but sometimes it’s ok to pat ourselves on the back and appreciate our accomplishments and this is a great accomplishment.

Canada is far from perfect however. We have a long way to go before we’re completely once and done from within our agent systems. But in our case it’s no longer a technological barrier impeding progress but a political barrier. This will only be overcome by: competition, clear focus from groups like Orbit, and above all else agent commitment to the technology available to them today. Waiting for the perfect solution is akin to learning to bike before you crawl.

NexCenter: It’s All in the Name

2010-04-15T09:07:00.000-07:00

All your broker solutions are now in one place. It’s the hub of all broker activity. It’s NexCenter.

Many of you know Brovada as the Nexisys company. It was the first of our software solutions for brokers and insurers. The one that put us on the map.

As Brovada grew, we expanded our product offering to include Nexpedite and NexQuote. We’re proud of these products and the services they’ve provided. But now it’s time to evolve.

Over the next couple of months our broker solutions will be consolidated into NexCenter.

NexCenter is the hub of all broker activity. It provides all the functionality of our previous products and much more. Like a suite of office software is comprised of a word processor, spreadsheets, etc, NexCenter is a suite of insurance software comprised of modules.

NexCenter will start with several modules: Insurer Connectivity, Data Integration, Script Recorder, and Electronic Forms. More modules will follow to further enhance the value of NexCenter down the road.

INSURER CONNECTIVITY
Upload and download to insurers using web services and via web portals.

RECORDING
Script creator that eliminates rekeying of web portal data during upload.

DATA INTEGRATION
An interface to the data stored within your broker system.

FORMS
Standard app forms for enhancing the upload and download of data.

To ensure our solutions provide the best possible value to our customers, we are looking to work together in partnership with innovative brokers. I encourage you to contact me directly if you are interested in participating in NexCenter solutions or other initiatives.

In a similar vein, we recently consolidated our insurer products into one brand: NexExchange. This change brought great clarity to the business solutions we provide to our insurer customers.

What’s in a name? In our case it’s more than a Shakespearian quote. It is your future and our past. Welcome to what’s Nex. NexCenter.

A Legacy of Trailblazing Leads to Elusive Treasure

2009-10-22T07:11:00.000-07:00

Brovada presents the first real time endorsement upload that provides feedback such as premium and rating information - with no portals required. It’s the Holy Grail insurance has been looking for.

Brovada is a company of firsts and is committed to pushing the limits of technology.

Brovada Nexisys provided the first real time automated upload to company portals 5 years ago. It has since become the leader in connectivity for brokers providing over 500 brokerages: single sign-on, inquiry, new business and endorsements.

Brovada NexQuote was the first real time new business and quoting solution without a portal that ran directly from the BMS; obtaining rates directly from the insurer.

Brovada Nexpedite is the first and only solution that allows brokers to create their own scripts against company portals; eliminating the need to rekey data when played back through Nexisys.

Brovada NexExchange is the first and only connectivity solution that can be implemented within the insurer’s infrastructure to provide real time endorsement upload without the need to use a portal. It also supports portfolio transfers; portal automation; system conversion; and system integration to policy admin systems using screens, API’s, databases, or MQ interfaces. The portal automation feature allows companies to put their portal into overdrive by providing a system standardized upload feature using Acord or CSIO standard web services.

*The success of NexExchange has far exceeded our expectations. Several implementations are underway today that will put these customers in an envious position of being the first to provide real time upload without a portal or locally stored rating information. Stay tuned for the announcements over the next few months.

Brovada is a business that has focused solely on solving these broker connectivity issues. With five years of experience and success under our belts, we’ve solved problems others haven’t even contemplated yet.

Industry-led groups have presented solutions based on a difficult to implement collective effort. Sounds great but in reality it’s like herding cats. And following the letter of the law laid out by the standards bodies is an onerous task. It would require: strict adherence, multimillions of dollars in changes, and a concerted implementation by the industry. Does that sound familiar? It should. It was called Syncron initially and then the CSIO portal the second time around.

While we support the goal of these initiatives, we opted to skip the collective effort and make existing systems work in a collective manner.

As we chart the future we will continue to bring solutions that solve the unsolvable and pursue opportunities for our customers that set them above their competition. We are thrilled to have found the Holy Grail and we hope everyone is able to drink from it. Long live innovation!

A Sea of Yellow School Buses

2009-08-04T08:27:00.000-07:00

How hard work and trying times can be a recipe for fond memories.

I was recently asked to speak at a leadership conference for the executives of NAMIC. The topic I was requested to speak about was very familiar to me and one that I’m very enthusiastic about so I was thrilled with the opportunity. The topic was “Portals or No Portals”, not a ground shaking topic to everyone in attendance but one that was important for them to hear and understand. Rarely speaking to such large audiences, I was a bit nervous but realized to get better at presenting I needed to embrace the opportunity.

The conference is very family oriented and I was encouraged to bring along my family. So to begin my presentation I decided to break the ice by sharing the exciting road trip my wife and four kids made from Saint John to Mont Tremblant. My youngest two are twin boys and they provide my wife and me with no shortage of great stories.

On the way we decided to stop overnight in Drummondville. We just got nicely settled into our room when the boys noticed that across the street was the biggest collection of school buses we’ve ever seen. The boys share a complete love affair for school buses. Bus, Bus, Bus, Bus was all that we heard until their heads hit their pillows that night. For them it was the greatest moment in their lives. For my wife and I, and anyone within earshot of our room, the noise was a nightmare. But the funny thing about memories are how soon we forget the bad and remember only the good. I fondly remember that moment and their excitement and will cherish it forever.

I highlight this point because it’s important to sometimes step back from the moment to realize how good things actually are. Brovada has been working diligently for over 6 years now to provide insurers and brokerages single entry solutions. We’ve made enhancements, added functionality, and created new solutions to allow for an effective transition to a utopian world of SEMCI.

Along the way we’ve had to deal with competitors - some reputable, others not. We had to convince brokers that our goal was the same as theirs even though they may have felt otherwise. We had to remove the image that we were doing something suspicious when it came to making portal usage more productive. And most importantly we’ve had to keep a balanced approach to the way we do business so as not to alienate either our insurer or broker customers.

As I think about what we’ve accomplished in the same light that I remember the school buses I am proud of our successes and the successes our customers have had using our solutions.

P.S. One specific sense of excitement looking back is that we have always pushed the fact that vendors (including ourselves) need to allow brokers the choice of whichever third party solutions make the most sense for them. This was a common philosophical agreement we shared with Vertafore and Ebix - the number 1 and 3 leading suppliers respectively of brokerage management solutions in the world. That philosophy also is shared with our Canadian partners. An article in Canadian Underwriter written by Pat Durepos of Keal titled Whose Data Is It Anyways? from June of 2007 is bang on. In the article Pat states that the data in the brokers systems belongs to the brokerages and should be freely available to them to utilize as they see fit.

Chaos Creates Opportunity

2009-05-14T13:45:00.000-07:00

I was recently in Costa Rica meeting with some colleagues. Rather than go to the famous resort area in the north I visited the authentic part of the country far removed from the serenity of the vacationer’s retreat.

San Jose and the surrounding towns and cities that I visited were in all essence a chaotic environment. The country is blossoming into a prosperous country which is putting pressure on the old infrastructure and way of life. Driving around the cities is like running a gauntlet which is made up of a large number of accidents, nonexistent civic addresses, narrow and unmaintained roads, regular pedestrian deaths, blatant infringement of motor vehicle laws and lack of police enforcement.

In addition to all this, the city I visited, Cartago, is built on the side of an active volcano that destroyed the city in the early 1900’s. Break-in and enters happen frequently enough that most houses have bars and razor wire wrapped around them.

However as bad as this may all sound, after a couple days you begin to overlook the bad and only notice the good. This is mainly because you begin to realize that the country is thriving and growing beyond its third world status. The locals, known as Ticos, are capitalizing on the opportunities that are being presented to them. Tourism is a large industry and based on the sheer beauty of the place will always be, but other industries that you may not even realize are playing a pivotal role in the transformation of the country.

Information Technology is one of their best successes. Intel and HP have large operations in San Jose and with the downturn cost sensitive corporations are looking to Costa Rica with their large base of highly trained cost effective resources. The universities focus heavily on churning out more and more engineers with the right skill sets to fill the growing demand.

More recently I’ve been reading a book by Malcolm Gladwell titled Outliers. In the book Gladwell highlights the importance of effort over natural ability and argues that everyone is capable of success if they simply put enough effort into something (10,000 hours is the rule of thumb). In one example he states that if it wasn’t for the Beatles playing 10 hours sets at a strip bar in Germany, they would never have been successful. His argument being that without the long sets they would have never have had enough training to become the great band they were. It was for this foresight that the Beatles saw the opportunity in playing longer than the typical 1 hour set in the chaos of a strip bar that set them apart from the bands that never make it big.

These two examples highlight the ability to find opportunity in even the worst chaos imaginable. The insurance industry, with the current market meltdown and economic recession, is also enduring the chaotic environment that will breed opportunities.

Some of the best ideas come from a dire need to deal with an extenuating circumstance. Our cherished public healthcare system is an example of this. It was the depression and a minority government that formed the catalyst and allowed this great idea to become reality.

For the insurers and brokerages dealing with large losses, unacceptable home evaluations, reduced premiums and fluid books there is no better time to invest in solutions that improve productivity, guarantee a technological advantage, invest in people and invest in new areas of growth. The result is immediate reduction and elimination of the negative impact, while positioning themselves for growth after the calm returns.

It’s survival of the fittest where the leaders will invest in the future and where the losers will struggle to exist.

Negative Campaigning Continues

2008-12-09T11:34:00.000-08:00

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

2008-09-12T09:58:00.000-07:00

“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

2008-05-29T08:59:00.000-07:00

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?

2008-04-11T12:19:00.000-07:00

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!!