INSURANCE INDUSTRY NEWS

Messagepoint Solution Enables Personalized, Scalable Interactive Customer Communications
Messagepoint Inc. is pleased to announce significant enhancements to its interactive customer communications solution, Messagepoint Connected, designed to enable large enterprises to deliver highly relevant, personalized customer communications at scale. Read more.

Insurers Can’t Afford to Ignore Distribution Connectivity Platforms: Novarica
With solution providers in the distribution connectivity space no longer considered novel, insurers can boost their presence during the customer buying experience and demonstrate ease of doing business to their distribution channel partners. In a new executive brief, Novarica provides an overview of the distribution ecosystem and profiles 20 prominent providers,. Read more.

SPJST Selects illustrate inc To Accelerate Life Insurance Digital Transformation
SPJST, a Texas based fraternal organization, has selected illustrate inc as their partner in digitizing their Life Insurance sale process. The move will provide SPJST with a fully automated, cloud-based system to strengthen the sale process, streamline the workflow, and provide exponential benefit throughout virtually every step of the entire process. Read more.

Survey Reveals Underinsurance Of Key Risks
Insurance companies and brokers need to go further to support the fast-growing digital health and wellness sector with more specialist coverage that meets its specific risk requirements and helps companies to navigate the complex risk landscape, according to a new report by Beazley. Read more.

Cal LeGrow And Synex Group Acquire GTI
Jeff LeGrow, CEO of Cal LeGrow and Synex Group, is pleased to announce the acquisition of GoToInsure.ca, which includes 19 locations in the Atlantic provinces. With the purchase of GTI, the combination of the three brokers will manage over CAD 345 million in premium volume across the region. Read more.

Brokerslink Adds B. Riley Advisory Services
Global broking business Brokerslink has added financial advisory, compliance, risk and resilience specialist B. Riley Advisory Services Group to its risk management capabilities. Read more.

Disaster Restoration Companies Unify Under Canadian Brand
FirstOnSite Restoration, Canada's leading property restoration company, is pleased to announce that eight North American sister companies from Canada, the U.S., and Puerto Rico have adopted the Canadian name and are moving to a new unified brand – FIRST ONSITE. Read more.

Property Owners, Prepare For Flood Season
As the warmer weather arrives, snowmelt coupled with rain presents an increased risk of flooding. Insurance Bureau of Canada (IBC) is informing consumers about how they can prepare for the coming flood season by protecting themselves and their property from water damage. Read more.

ICTA NOMINATIONS

Digitizing The Process For Hearing Loss Claims
The noise-induced hearing loss online claim form provides a new digital channel to submit claims, attach necessary supporting documents and provide us with claim information up front, improving the adjudication process. It successfully takes a fresh approach to agile development and delivery, helping to drive a culture of innovation and pushing boundaries in our use of technology to deliver efficient digital solutions for people with claims, health care providers and WSIB employees. Read more.

Pollution Loss Database Helps Adjusters
Until recently at Charles Taylor, our loss adjusters, risk managers and underwriters relied on their own personal experiences and those of their colleagues to assess oil and gas risks and estimate loss reserves. We recognized that using our 20+ years of experience in managing oil and gas losses, we could improve this method of working by drawing on our significant historical data. From this we could provide objective analytics on loss trends that would assist our own loss adjusters, as well as risk managers and underwriters. Read more.

Taking Customer Communications To A New Level
Traditional Broker Management Systems (BMS) have limited customization, built on older, manual processes and are often costly to implement and scale. The Ai Insurance Organization developed our customizable BMS/CRM solution in 2015 to replace our traditional BMS system and improve efficiencies for client and policy lifecycles. We continue to grow through innovation in 2021. Read more.

Digitizing Distribution for Life & Health Insurance
Finaeo provides life/health insurance with a complete digital ecosystem to power digital distribution from the insurance manufacturer, through brokers and to the end customer. To help keep clients engaged in the digital journey, Finaeo provides brokers with a fully white-labelled “client portal”, which includes a digital onboarding/fact-find experience, collaborative document sharing and a “digital wallet” to store policies/applications from multiple carriers in one place. Read more.

In the InsurTech Spotlight this week:

FormHero
FormHero is a rapidly expanding low-code Smart Forms platform for transforming legacy and paper processes into dynamic and elegant digital experiences. Smart Forms help eliminate paperwork and streamline processes by bringing a pragmatic approach to digital transformation that sees projects come to life in days, not years. Learn more.

Calling all InsurTechs! Click here to participate.

From Doug The insurance industry has moved along the digital transformation path, from advertising on the internet to selling insurance product online, where they found a growing segment of the population were willing to transact insurance purchases and services. Customer experience became a major focus – making digital transactions quicker and easier, and making it simpler to find answers to questions by connecting to an agent mid-stream. As the digital ecosystem enables ready access to an increasing number of products and services across many industries, there is a growing opportunity to increase the size of a sale by offering additional products from other industries. The travel industry is a classic example, with travel insurance generally offered as part of the purchase of a trip. The add-on could be a offered as an option – opt-in or opt-out – or it could be just a standard component without any options. Warranties likewise run the gamut. A basic warranty is part of the purchase, without option. An extended warranty is typically optional. New examples are emerging, such as Tesla in the automotive industry offering insurance. How quickly might this concept expand, and how soon will it roll out? What will be the impact on the insurance industry as we know it? We see some examples in the 2021 ICTA nominations being published this month. For a more extensive discussion of insurance as an add-on, I recommend Seth Rachlin's piece “Want Some Insurance With That?” for Insurance Thought Leadership. Doug Grant, CIP Partner Insurance-Canada.ca