Untangling a Spider Web of Connectivity

With a professional background in information technology, and a long family history in the insurance brokerage business, Insurance Brokers Association of Canada (IBAC) technology champion Sheldon Wasylenko seems a natural choice to help the industry untie the Gordian knot that is broker-carrier
connectivity.

Wasylenko’s mother and father bought Rayner Agencies Ltd., the family’s Saskatchewan- based general insurance brokerage,  in 1971. It’s tempting to think Sheldon immediately followed the path of his brother and sister in working for the family business. But although Wasylenko did ultimately join the family brokerage in late 2005 (he is now a general manager at Rayner Agencies), he first worked in the IT industry for more than 27 years.

Wasylenko moved into IT soon after graduating from the University of Saskatchewan with a commerce degree, specializing in information technology. In 1989, he became a consultant for Digital Equipment Corporation (now HP). He stayed at Digital Equipment for eight years, before moving on to become an account executive at Systemhouse Ltd. for three years starting in December 2001. He then did a four-year stint at EDS, before coming full circle and joining the family brokerage in 2005.

In the IT field, Wasylenko helped a variety of different business clients find service delivery solutions using new technological interfaces with the public. He did multi-disciplinary work in the retail, manufacturing, banking, government and health care sectors, including work with government agencies such as SaskTel, Sask Power and SaskHealth.

For Wasylenko, providing business solutions is his core interest in technology. “I always liked technology, but for me it’s more of the business of technology – how we employ it and use it to make our businesses work better,” he says. “I mean, I like technology for the sake of technology – playing with the latest mobile devices like we all do. But it’s the application of those devices in our daily life and work environment that are of interest to me. When we can make or make use of technology to enhance our day-to-day life and work environment, that’s what it’s all about.”

Once he started to work for the family brokerage in 2005, Wasylenko was immediately recruited to work on the insurance industry’s complex problem of connecting brokerages to their many insurance company carriers. The broad aim is for a brokerage to be able to send policy transactions to multiple insurance companies through its broker management system (BMS), and have the companies complete the transaction by returning data right back into the broker’s BMS. The Centre for the Study of Insurance Operations (CSIO) was trying to help develop a single-entry, multiple company interface (SEMCI) solution to this problem at the very time Wasylenko’s brother encouraged Sheldon to represent Sask- atchewan brokers on the CSIO board. Based on the encouragement of his brother and at the invitation of the CSIO, Wasylenko joined the CSIO board in April 2005.

Shortly thereafter, the industry abandoned the multi-million-dollar CSIO Portal Project. “When the Portal went away in 2006, the whole industry went into what I would call a quiet state for a year,” Wasylenko observes. “I think we needed time to regroup and rethink what we really needed to do. What happened after 12-18 months was that a lot of companies started to come out with portal technology. They started to pop up like gophers on the Prairie.

“We [brokers] said we can understand the purpose behind it, and we know why they are coming up with these [individual company portals], but it’s not necessarily the best way to work in terms of workflow.

“If I’m representing half a dozen companies in my office, to train all of my staff to use six different systems fluently is a real challenge. I’d rather train them once. And I would rather train them on a system that I’m using, because that is the investment I made, and I may as well work in that system.”

This very sentiment among brokers nationwide was reflected in a national survey IBAC conducted soon after the demise of the CSIO Portal Project. In April 2007, IBAC CEO Dan Danyluk approached Wasylenko to become IBAC’s ‘technology champion.’ Wasylenko agreed, and he has since been joined by fellow technology champion Brenda Rose.

IBAC’s technology committee set out in November 2008 to explore ways to improve efficiencies and test broker-carrier connectivity through a pilot project with the industry’s leading BMS vendors. Phase 1 of the project involved verifying the vendors’ ability to generate one standard, specific, CSIO-compliant XML Policy Change transaction from within their respective broker systems and electronically transmit it to a specified location. The project has now moved into Phase II, Wasylenko notes, which is to see if insurers can receive the policy change transaction created in Phase I in a standard, usable format. Wasylenko describes the goal of the project as a form of electronic pitch-and-catch: brokers send out a policy transaction and insurers ‘catch’ it in a format recognized by their systems. Insurers then pitch back their response in a way that the brokers’ management systems can catch it.

This seems straightforward enough. What has prevented it from happening in the insurance industry thus far?

“It’s a complex array of different systems out there,” Wasylenko says. “Large companies have grown through acquisitions not once, but many times. They tend to inherit the legacy stuff that comes from those companies. They may have an underwriting system that looks like this – i.e. one that was built on this generation of technology – and they have a policy management system over here that may have been home-grown, or it was built at a different time, using a different platform. And they have to start tying together the underwriting and claims management policy systems, and their HR stuff. All of that stuff needs to start coming together. You have all of that not once, but many times for different companies. And then you have the broker management systems on the front end of that, and it’s a very difficult.

“What we’ve seen happen is that we have ‘n’ different systems on the front end, you have ‘m’ different systems on the back end, and you have this ‘n’ to ‘m’ relationship. It just becomes this big spider web of connectivity. We’ve wanted to see the entire spider web condensed down to a single pipe, which is from any BMS system to any company.”

If the brokers have their way, untying the Gordian knot (spider web?) would lead to a coveted once-and-done solution. “It promotes the efficiency of our broker distribution channel when we can take any BMS that’s out there and you can send a policy from that system, whichever one it may be, and go ‘click’ and send it to a company, and that [insurance] company can say, ‘Got it,'” Wasylenko says. “They can then take it internally. They can batch it overnight. In an ideal word, they can send back a response in real time saying ‘Got it. Here’s your answer.’ And that’s all happening within the context of milliseconds in Internet time. That’s where I think I know we can go, and that’s where our project is headed.”

When it might get there is anyone’s guess. Wasylenko noted any project has three fundamental elements – investment, scope and time – and any one of those elements is determined by the other two. In other words, once the scope of the project and the nature of the participants’ investment is clear, the amount of time to complete the project will become known. In the meantime, IBAC’s technology committee is working with brokers, vendors and the
insurers in incremental steps. “We’re excited,” Wasylenko says of the work accomplished thus far. “We’re making progress and I think people are getting behind it. They see that it’s possible.”