Vendors start third-party portal project

Two insurance industry technology vendors have joined to launch a portal that could compete with the planned industry-wide effort.
Compu-Quote and iter8 Inc. say they will provide an end-to-end portal solution for the industry that will beat the Centre for Study of Insurance Operations (CSIO) portal to the market.
“collabor8” is intended to give insurers the ability to write new business and perform policy changes online in real-time. “Individual insurers can take advantage of this now with their current legacy systems,” says Glen Piller, president of iter8 Inc. He says one of the key benefits is that the system is ready to go now, and can be up and running with insurer systems quickly. “The implementation process for a typical p&c insurer portal would be a fraction of the time that it would take to build from scratch,” he says. “With collabor8, brokers could start using a streamlined end-to-end policy change and new business capability on a company portal within months, as opposed to the years projected for other solutions.”
The system has a central repository of business intelligence rules, with pre-built capabilities. “The ability to quickly create, edit, test and maintain business rules minimizes changes to back-office systems and solves many maintenance issues,” states a joint release. The system also promised to work with any source third party report data from retrieval through merging to rules application.