Canadian brokers, insurers, software vendors working towards ‘Ideal Electronic Workflow’

Canadian brokers are starting a new round of testing with insurers and broker management system (BMS) technology vendors of a pilot program designed to achieve an ideal electronic workflow incorporating the tricky area of policy changes.
In its 2009 annual report, the Insurance Brokers Association of Canada (IBAC) said it is preparing to launch Phase II of a project intended to implement IBAC’s ‘Ideal Electronic Workflow diagram,’ approved in September 2008.
The IBAC Ideal Workflow is based on several essential principles, such as:
•    strict use of CSIO standards;
•    the ability to begin and end any transaction from within a broker’s management system;
•    minimal insurer-specific data to be programmed into broker management systems (BMS) or entered manually by brokers; and
•    customization to accommodate insurer systems is to be built on the insurer side of the transaction, limiting the potential amount of custom programming required.
The pilot program is an example of putting the above principles into practice.
Phase I of the pilot program “involved the [IBAC technology] committee’s challenging BMS vendors to demonstrate their ability to generate and transmit a simple policy change,” IBAC’s technology committee reports. “At the point of writing, four of six major Canadian vendors have successfully completed the first phase, with another vendor expecting completion by the end of September.”
Phase I involved BMS vendors showing they could send their policy change data to a simple electronic mailbox.
Phase II of the project will involve completing the above transmission, only now with insurers receiving the policy change transaction in a standard, usable format.
IBAC’s technology committee is currently drawing up the specifications for Phase II and discussing potential insurer partners for the testing.