ESIS Plugs Into Canada

ESIS, Inc., a risk management services company based in the United States, has just launched a new Canadian operation, ESIS Canada, Inc., in Toronto.

“ESIS Canada is focused on North American companies with Canadian operations and their claims and risk control needs,” ESIS Canada director Steven Young said in a release announcing the new venture. “ESIS Canada clients will benefit from the experience of our people. They know how to address the industry- specific issues Canadian companies face.”

Established in 1953, ESIS, Inc. offers claims professionals and best practices, risk control services, and claims data technology that can be customized to meet clients’ needs.

ESIS, Inc. is part of the ACE Group of Companies, headed by ACE Limited. ACE Canada, also a member of the ACE Group of Companies, provides commercial property and casualty products and services throughout Canada.

“Toronto is where the insurance market is [in Canada],” according to Young, when asked why ESIS chose to locate in Toronto. “We have been previously operating [as an] ACE service unit, but now the business is such that we want to make an impact and we’ve become ESIS Canada.

“We’re incorporated, we’re licensed and we have licensed adjusters. So, all Canadian and ready to go.”

The idea is to put the ESIS Canada brand on business the company’s clients do north of the 49th parallel, Young said.

“One thing is, there’s a tremendous amount of cross-border traffic both ways,” according to John F. Ryan, senior vice president of strategic marketing at ESIS, Inc.

Ryan is based in ESIS’s Philadelphia office. He and Young spoke during an interview at the September 2006 Rims Canada Conference in Calgary.

“A number of Canadian clients that have business in the United States need these services today, as well as a number of U.S. companies that have operations up here,” Ryan said. “And the insurance market, the management of risk, is very similar…

“I won’t say [starting ESIS Canada] was easy – it’s never easy starting things – but it is something that was easier because we had ACE Canada to work with.”

Aside from its Canadian focus, and the requirement to respect Canadian laws, ESIS Canada operates on “basically the same concept” as ESIS, Inc., Young noted. What differentiates ESIS Canada’s business from other risk management service companies is access to proprietary ESIS technology such as Global RiskAdvantage, ESIS’ own RMIS system.

Through this system, clients have access to consolidated claims information that is updated on a daily basis, Young and Ryan said. This information is also available using Canadian currency. The breadth of information is what sets the system apart from others, Ryan added.

“I can tell you that for some of the features [of the ESIS system], like access to adjuster’s notes, not all systems will be able to do that,” Ryan said. “The ability to set alerts when something happens – to splash your PDA – that’s somewhat unique….

“We can add something called a ‘sidecar,’ where 10 data elements can be selected that are unique to that client and aren’t necessarily normally collected.”

For example, clients can ask for specific claims information based on unique data elements – everything from the claimant’s name, address, cause of loss, payments and reserves. “The larger the company, the more the chance they’re going to have some kind of unique reporting needs,” Ryan said.

Ryan added that a large client might have multiple operations and therefore they may want to record certain return-to-work data or certain cause-of-accident data that is not normally collected. “And coding,” Ryan added. “They [might] have a coding scheme for [the requested data elements], because they want to analyze and report on it. We can do that.”

ESIS Inc.’s technology has been developed since 1998 and has gone through several platforms. ESIS Inc. is planning to migrate eventually to the Microsoft product .NET, which Ryan calls “the leading edge for Web-enabled systems.” As Microsoft itself puts it: “The primary goal of .NET is to provide developers with the means to create interoperable applications using ‘Web services’ from any sort of terminal – be it a personal computer, a PDA, a mobile phone, and so forth.”

Meanwhile, ESIS, Inc. is continuing to invest in graphics and imagery, Ryan said. The upshot is to have a totally comprehensive, electronic system for analyzing claims.

“In the United States now, you can look at the entire claims file online,” Ryan said. “We’re going to be in the future converting Canada – I’m not sure of the date – but we will be paperless in our claims operations.”

Of course legal and regulatory conditions in Canada might give rise to some obstacles in developing a completely paperless claims operation in Canada, as Young points out,.

What if clients are using an existing system to store their claims information? Are there any obstacles that would prevent clients from using an existing system and transferring over to the ESIS Canada system?

Young said the transfer “can be done with our data tapes. If we took over an existing portfolio of outstanding claims, for example, we can do that.”

In terms of targeted markets, Young said ESIS clients seem to have “gravitated to mostly the general liability side,” as well as product liability. “We have a large car manufacturer and so on like that,” he said. “Whatever is produced out there, the resultant product creates liability. That seems to be where most of the potential business is.”

Based on the development of the business in Canada, ESIS Canada would certainly consider expanding beyond Toronto, although it has no immediate, firm plans to do so.

“It’s going to be driven by business demand,” Ryan said. “We’re a little opportunistic in how we are going to do that.”