ADVANCING INSURANCE AUTOMATION

Savino explains that the participants have worked together for years on other industry projects. They understand the business from every angle of operations. He says of the group, quite simply, that “this is a dream team.”

The team’s work—and the inchanted product—all started with a problem needing a solution: Producers, he says, especially “road warriors,” were always left behind and still using paper to conduct business. With a wealth of technology already transforming other business functions, something needed to change.

Savino says that it took 35 years to develop a system for producers. “It’s no joke; the conversation was ongoing,” he explains. “Over the years, as more technology hit the market, each new solution would not simplify the producer’s workload.”

So that’s where this dream team focused their efforts: producers. These revenue generators had no technology designed with their needs in mind, he says. “A lot of tools and solutions are built for somebody who’s sitting at their desk with three monitors—pre-COVID,” Savino notes.

“Any type of content can be shared or published on inchanted, … a podcast, any type of video, a web link, a PDF, a Word doc, an Excel spreadsheet—you name it.”

—Michael Herron

Chief Development Officer

Onivas Technologies

“With inchanted, producers can now collaborate through the app from the field with teammates.”

—Keith Savino

Board Member

Onivas Technologies

These days, with fewer people in the office, the need for producer-facing tech is imperative to their success. Hartnett adds that in many agencies producers don’t use the agency management systems and policy management systems.

Not that automation is new to the industry; as Hartnett puts it, automation has been happening in the industry for decades. “But those efforts have essentially been to automate the task of CSRs,” he

notes. “They haven’t really applied to the producers—the people in the field who are tasked with earning the money to run the agency.”

Instead, Hartnett says, producers “are left to the traditional methods that go back over a hundred years. They’ve got mobile email, but after that they don’t really have any automation that helps them to do their jobs in a realistic way.”

He adds, “A lot of the things producers do still require pen or pencil on paper, or filling out a form and taking it back into the office to have it input by somebody else, because that’s the way the workflow has been designated.” While automation had existed that helped with pieces of a producer’s tasks, Hartnett says “nothing has really come together in a way that the average producer would feel comfortable using.”

Until inchanted. A ground-up solution built on the latest technology stack, Savino says “producers along with agencies, as well as carriers, wholesalers and vendors, are able to automate their content management and forms in a brand-new ecosystem accessible by literally everyone.”

For the last couple of years, Herron and team have been working on what producers needed from their mobile app solution—and testing and refining the offering. “When done,” he says, “guess what we found? What we built for producers works just as well for desktop users. And it brings collaboration between producers, account execs and even risk managers to a new level.”

Pencils down

In keeping with technology offerings in so many other areas of life, the pen can stay in the pocket, just reach for your mobile device.

Savino says manual data collection today, as well as fractured collaboration in multiple systems, is still very much a reality the industry is working to overcome, and it slows the process. “Use your voice to speed up information collection,” he says. “With inchanted, producers can now collaborate through the app from the field with teammates. Of course, now those teammates are also a new kind of road warrior—working remotely.”

“When trying to automate and streamline

the producer’s role in insurance,

it required plenty of time and brainstorming.”

—Bill Hartnett

President

Onivas Technologies

And just like Amazon Prime and Netflix media, you can operate in “airplane” mode. “It doesn’t matter whether or not you have an internet connection; you can use inchanted offline,” Herron explains. “This is huge for a producer who wants something as reliable as a pen and paper. Even where there’s no available Wi-Fi or cell service, app subscribers still have access to their clients and content.”

Tech, content management and forms?

Good tech works well, regardless of the platform. The inchanted app was built for all operating system platforms: iOS, Android, and Windows. This results in a real mobile app experience—not just a browser display—and gives producers both online and offline use. Integrations based upon AL3, XML and JSON support the modern APIs.

Everyone will be able to download inchanted and use it on a mobile device or a desktop computer. “It’s all game-changing stuff,” Savino explains.

Herron says the company went beyond just forms when building out the app. “Any type of content can be shared or published on inchanted,” he explains. “It can be a podcast, any type of video, a web link, a PDF, a Word doc, an Excel spreadsheet—you name it.”

Savino is a firm believer that content management focused on the right audience—company leaders refer to inchanted audience members as “subscribers”—changes everything. “Carriers, MGAs, publishers, and consultants can reach new markets and go deep into the sales and service channel,” Savino says.

Included content ranges from the most basically utilized ACORD personal and commercial forms in fillable format and the ability to share those forms with clients as fillable forms (instead of PDF only) to information from trade associations, consultants, trainers, user groups and recognized publishers, including The Rough Notes Company.

“Trade associations and industry communities can better serve their members by repurposing content that’s perhaps growing digital dust,” he adds. “Content is also crowd sourced from existing industry sources, individual consultants, even the enterprise itself.” This is where the Etsy analogy comes from.

Hartnett, Herron, and other advocates, such as Savino, are excited about the potential that inchanted can bring to producers. “We’re finally addressing the people who actually write the business that starts the whole relationship with the client,” Hartnett explains. The goal, he says, is to “give them the level of automation that their peers or colleagues in the office have had for decades that they themselves haven’t been able to utilize.”

“I think it’s a game changer,” says Savino, because, as he puts it, it has a wide range of applications within the industry. The inchanted offering, which has an identical interface over every platform, “is an app similar to the mobile gaming model that 100% of the insurance industry can download.

“Whether they’re an underwriter at an insurance company, work for a trade association, are in claims, or are in production—and in any location—real-time forms and insurance information will be available on any device, at any time, and anywhere they need it,” he adds.

A rollout with purpose

Herron says that because the team has a “very long history in the space, frankly we are held to a higher standard by our peers. We are in no rush. We’d rather do this right,” he says. Hence, the slow, controlled rollout—which started late last year. Hartnett says the product is in the middle of a soft rollout to a limited number of partners, agencies, carriers, integration vendors and publishers, and companies.

Until full rollout takes place in late 2024 or early 2025, the company is happy to take early adopter requests online. To get more information, visit inchanted.com.

The author

Lori Widmer is a Philadelphia-based writer and editor who specializes in insurance and risk management.