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CSIO CEO praises departing director Orr for encouraging eDocs development


May 14, 2015   by Canadian Underwriter


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Stratford, Ont.-based broker Rick Orr was recognized Thursday for his “tremendous vision and tireless efforts” in promoting the eDocs information technology standard as his term on the board of directors of the Centre for the Study for Insurance Operations (CSIO) came to an end.

Centre for the Study for Insurance Operations held its member's meeting in Toronto

Orr “worked tirelessly with the industry to make sure that  the eDocs standard got developed and implemented,” CSIO president and chief executive officer Catherine Smola told the association’s members Thursday during the annual meeting at the National Club in downtown Toronto.

CSIO – a Toronto-based association of property and casualty insurers, brokers and technology vendors – oversees development, implementation and maintenance of technology standards and forms for the insurance industry. One of those standards is eDocs, which is intended to let brokers download policy documents directly from a carrier’s computer system to a broker management system (BMS), and to store those documents in their BMS without manual intervention.

Catherine Smola, president and CEO, Centre for Study of Insurance OperationsCSIO’s eDocs certification program is “designed to ensure standards-based solutions are uniformly implemented across the country, significantly improving efficiencies to the broker channel,” Smola (pictured right) told members in April, 2014 at its annual meeting in Toronto.

On Thursday CSIO chairman Steve Whitelaw noted a total of 19 companies (10 in 2014) have now attained eDocs certification.

During the formal portion of the meeting, several existing directors were acclaimed to new terms. New to the board, as of Thursday, is John Belyea, chief operating officer of Moore McLean Insurance Group Ltd. Also acclaimed to the board was Janet Rodger, vice president of National Operations and PMO at RSA Canada.

Rick OrrOrr’s two year term ended. An owner and account executive at Orr Insurance Brokers Inc., Rick Orr (pictured right) was president of the Insurance Brokers Association of Ontario in 2012. He “had tremendous vision and tireless efforts to encourage CSIO to implement the eDocs standard,” Smola said Thursday. “A mere three years ago, the eDocs standard did not even exist. When I first joined CSIO about three years ago, the first call I got from one of the directors, at my home one evening, was Rick Orr.”

eDocs, Smola added, is now “widely used across the broker channel, resulting in improved workflow and millions of dollars in savings for the industry.”

Whitelaw noted that in 2014, CSIO launched an eDocs Savings Calculator, which lets brokers to calculate how much money they save by implementing eDocs.

Eight board members have one year left in their two-year terms. They are: vice-chairman Ted Harman, president of Accent Insurance Solutions of Montreal; Cam Loeppky, vice-president of information services for Wawanesa Mutual Insurance Company; Sean Christie, chief information officer and vice-president of information services at Gore Mutual Insurance Company; Jack Ott, senior vice president and chief information officer at Intact Financial Corp.; Andrew Wood, chief information officer of Northbridge Financial Corp.; Bill Simms, commercial accounts director of Crosbie Jobs Insurance; Sheldon Wasylenko, general manager of Rayner Agencies Ltd.; and Robert Merizzi, chief information officer and executive vice-president of business systems transformation at Aviva Canada.

Also acclaimed to two-year terms Thursday were Whitelaw – who remains chairman – and Keith Jordan, president and chief executive officer of Hub International Horizon Insurance.


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