CIAB’s insurance exchange: It’s all good

ltoops@sbmedia.com — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 19:16:16 +0000

While I was attending the ASCnet TENCon in Kansas City earlier this month, CIAB made big news by announcing a partnership with LexisNexis to build a Web-based insurance exchange for independent producers.

The project, which goes into testing next summer, is designed to make interface easier between insurers and producers– a subject near and dear to the heart of Jeff Yates, the head of IIABA’s ACT group.

Yates believes any industry interest in promoting more efficient Web-based communication is a good thing, especially when it’s targeting medium-to-large commercial lines business and is being promoted by a group with the big-broker clout of the Council.

However, he cautioned, “let’s not lose sight of the tools we already have” in the ongoing quest for information sharing–specifically, the real time initiative that he and many others have been tirelessly promoting for years. (No coincidence that ASCnet’s new chair is Lisa Parry Becker, whose passion about real time is well documented in the industry.)

The CIAB arrangement could facilitate more online collaboration between brokers, carriers and underwriters and the sharing of unstructured data such as loss runs and financial reports. “Otherwise, brokers and/or carriers will set up their own collaboration sites for this purpose,” Yates said.

He added it will be interesting to see how willing brokers and carriers are to embrace another aspect of the CIAB model, where market-related trends and information are consolidated and shared, because of the fear of compromising their competitive advantage rooted in their firm’s unique market intelligence.

Yates is convinced that no matter what happens with the Council project, “real time will remain the core transaction, even in the larger commercial space.” Real-time technology, although usually equated with smaller business, is extremely viable in the large commercial business arena; some carriers are already using real time to import midsized to larger commercial lines data into carrier systems, Yates noted. Real-time tools are starting to be used for moving unstructured data such as loss runs and financial reports between brokers and carriers as well.

“And agents are starting to move beyond using commercial lines download for just small commercial business to using it for the more standard larger commercial policies such as workers’ comp, commercial auto and umbrella,” Yates said. “There is a big push within the industry to improve the amount and quality of data downloaded.”

Do you think the CIAB insurance exchange will take hold in the industry?

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CIAB’s insurance exchange: It’s all good