The impact of Gore Mutual’s new operating model
July 26, 2021 by Greg Meckbach
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Gore Mutual has gone live with technology that lets the carrier bind policies for brokers, in minutes in some cases.
The Cambridge, Ont.-based property and casualty insurer “has completely changed the operating model for personal lines,” CEO Andy Taylor said last week in an interview with Canadian Underwriter.
“In our prior model, which was a traditional model, it might be days before we finalized the file and actually returned all the information [to quote and bind a policy]. With the new model we are looking at straight through-processing and direct connectivity to our brokers.”
Gore Mutual announced July 8 its new operating model for Ontario personal lines automobile and individually rated commercial auto insurance. That model uses Amazon Connect technology.
It allows straight-through processing for 90% of personal lines auto, Taylor told Canadian Underwriter July 23.
Gore Mutual is on track to go live with personal property this fall.
The new model lets Gore deliver “fully-bound business in a matter of minutes that used to quite literally take days,” said Taylor.
In some cases Gore Mutual can return quotes in less than 10 seconds, said Taylor.
“Amazon Connect has tons of potential. It will give Gore Mutual a number of capabilities that it did not have previously,” Taylor told Canadian Underwriter earlier.
For its brokers, one of Gore Mutual’s targets is to have the capability to automate 95% or more of renewals in personal lines.
In Cambridge, Gore Mutual’s new national contact centre team is up and running. That team services brokers and their customers for personal lines automobile and individually-rated commercial auto underwriting and billing.
“We have consolidated underwriting, billing and broker teams into one national contact centre,” Gore Mutual said in a release.
Using the new technology, we now have direct connectivity to 100% of broker management systems which is one key change,” Taylor told Canadian Underwriter July 23.
Brokers are telling Gore Mutual that the speed of the technology allows them to compete with direct writers, said Taylor.
“To be fair [some] other carriers are providing a similar experience.”
The carrier has been working with outside advisors to understand customer journeys and broker journeys, and look for points on the journey where we can make it seamless and make it more efficient for the customer and for the broker.
“We are designing our work flows and our technology to support that,” said Taylor.
Feature image via iStock.com/naveebird
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The rhetoric today is on the consequences of failure to live in a world of information processing of cyclotron-like speed, as if we have to be controlled by a giant mechanism like the Hadron Collider, where for a minimal amount of inputting, a machine somewhere will do our thinking for us, a cyborg taking over that works in terms of nanoseconds while at best, we try to fathom that an nanosecond is to a second what a second is to thirty-one point seven years. Our intelligence is being compromised by the principle of Occam’s razor where reductionism is defended by limiting assumptions to no more than is necessary. And by this introduction to the business of insurance, we are evoking Euclid’s theory of arguments expanded to a conversion of absurdity.
But why has our obsession with rushing insurance information become such an uncontrollable mindset that we can’t pick up any reading material of the industry without being inundated by it and made to think that, as is the case with an urban myth, if we hear about it long enough, it must be real? Unfortunately, that is the reality and it is why one can view insurance as being changed to a system of ones and zeros as if that’s all that counts now in the undertaking of risk. The system of black and white has replaced the time-honored method of deciding the variegated grays of risk acceptance by the human factor; someone reviews the hazards and exposures and decides on the measure of risk against the standard and, with that information, rates premium accordingly. Where’s the need in that to hurry? What is the reason behind getting a quote like yesterday for right now? Why has the broker’s involvement been fused into a minimum time-frame for action? Why has the judgment of risk from the broker’s perspective suddenly changed the time it takes to pre-underwrite for all parties concerned to a hopped-up green light to get information from here to there in the least amount of time?
Our sensibilities as insurance people are numbed by the so-called intellect of the computer and why we have come to believe that it has the faculty for rationality, understanding and instinct on which to base decisions. It doesn’t. We can’t make it work anything like the human brain and therefore it cannot speak from emotion, passion and ideals – we’re still in charge. So why the rush? Slow down, let insurance find its own speed and if it can’t get out of first in a hurry, there must be a good reason. And give the cyborgs the day off!