By John Maes
Tim Wright is co-founder of Riskclick and its chief executive officer.
The Internet, with its promise of being the catapult to launch business into new stratospheres of sales, marketing and client service, is becoming a mainstay among insurance agents and brokers.
But doing business via the Internet requires the agent to go to a higher level, says Howard Green, president of Riskclick, a New York and London-based Web enabling service. Your business must be "e-enabled," he notes. "Agents might think that e-business is just about having a Web site, and nothing could be further from the truth," he says. "A Web site is a good starting point but the real power of the Internet is to revolutionize the way that you interact and collaborate with your clients and markets. Agents and brokers have made good progress but the fact is that 95% of all interactions in commercial insurance continue to rely on antiquated paper processes. The big challenge now is getting rid of the paper."
Agents and brokers will play a more important role, not a less important one, in a digital world, explains Green. "The Internet will greatly increase choice, innovation and market scope. Clients will rely even more on their agents and brokers to help them navigate through this expanded field of choice and select right solutions. But in order to succeed, brokers and agents will need new tools to help them act faster, with better information and greater accuracy. This is where Riskclick comes in."
E-business preparedness involves gearing up to actually conduct and transact business online. Current technologies may allow clients to do basic housekeeping and administrative functions online but not much more than that.
Green, along with Tim Wright, CEO, describes Riskclick as collaborative e-business software that is custom tailored to the property/casualty insurance industry and made available to agents and brokers at a fraction of the cost and without the risk of traditional methods of technology procurement.
Electronic submissions enabled by matches of risk information with insurer profiles are also possible with Riskclick. In addition, the product is set up to provide quick access to relevant editorial content from such publications as Rough Notes and Business Insurance, according to Green.
One of the big impacts of collaborative e-business is to promote the client from "spectator" to full participant. Green predicts that brokers and agents who harness collaborative e-business will highly differentiate themselves in the eyes of the client and will gain a big competitive advantage. "We have done a lot of research with clients and the one big criticism that keeps coming back is that agents and brokers don't keep the client in the loop--they go off and do their thing and the client waits for a call. Riskclick's collaborative e-business software enables the agent and broker to make the client a part of the team, to see what is going on in real time and to share information seamlessly."
Wright says he's speaking from experience about the frustration of the client's having a hard time staying on top of what the broker is doing with his/her insurance program. When Riskclick was being formed last year, Wright and Green found it took more than three months to secure D&O coverage for their fledgling venture while the broker shopped the market and relayed coverage information, supporting documents and changes in their business plan back and forth to the underwriter, largely by fax. Consequently, the application had to be redone several times, adding to the paper parade, Wright explains.
--Howard Green, President, Riskclick
Senior Vice President-Technology Karim Hussein, left, directs the Riskclick technology strategy. Adam Sandler, senior vice president-functional design, transforms the business and strategic requirements into technical implementation.
"During the three months there was a lot of paper sent over by fax and we were in the dark as to how the process was proceeding," he explains. Had Green and Wright been able to use their own product, "we would have been invited into the process and we could have added information to the central files to simply create a new version of the same document rather than re-do the whole application again," Wright says. "We also could have updated the business plan and passed that on to the underwriter. It would have been a much more efficient information capture."
The document management features are a critical component of the more collaborative broker/client relationship that will result from use of Riskclick, according to Green. Each and every document related to the client's insurance program will be deposited in a central file that will be used jointly by the broker, insured and others allowed access. All participants will immediately be able to electronically see changes or additions to the file, virtually eliminating the danger of misconnections that can occur with e-mail, faxes, express mail deliveries or with the re-keying of information.
Representing several of Riskclick's divisions are Donald W. Russell, Jr., senior vice president-customer service; James W. Moore, senior vice president-marketing; Adam Sandler, senior vice president-functional design; Tim Wright, CEO; Anthony Siggers, chief technology officer and co-founder; and Karim Hussein, senior vice president-technology.
In spite of an organization's best efforts, documents can be mis-filed when handled by employees, according to Green. Too often, brokerages end up relying on paper versions of important documents and they might unknowingly not be dealing with its latest version. "Even with desktops, people are generally very bad about putting documents, whether electronic or paper, in the right places," he says.
The result? Critical documents can be lost or difficult to find when needed. But with Riskclick all the related documents are automatically funneled into central files created by the broker, explains Green. Thus a well-lighted audit trail is created, from which the origin of every document in the file can be traced.
"Instead of the broker having a set of files, and the client and the insurer having their own sets of files, everyone is now working with the same set. This is a big deal in insurance because contract formation relies on being certain as to which versions of documents have been used. When I e-mail a document to an underwriter, two versions are created--one on my machine (or network) one on the underwriter's. There is no way to tell with certainty which version is official. With Riskclick, there is never more than one version at any time; furthermore, all predecessor versions can be recalled," Green explains.
As "collaboration owner," the broker makes the call as to who is allowed access to what folder, sub-folder or documents and the functions they are allowed to perform: reading, revising or making additions. Rigid security features enforce access through issuance of electronic "tokens" that authenticate each user.
Brokers already using the product give high marks to the document management capabilities. Says Jamie Crystal, senior managing director of Frank J. Crystal & Co. in New York: "Whereas it would otherwise be limited by proprietary format, you can put any electronic document into the Riskclick system: a picture, a spreadsheet, a Word document, an Adobe PDF document, a copy of a policy--whatever it might be--it's extremely flexible."
Quotes for coverage and placement-related documents are also nicely separated--and in sequential order noting time and date of origin, he says. "If we send out underwriting specifications to eight different carriers, the file management system keeps the responses from all eight of the carriers separately so I can look at them individually." He describes what the contents of a typical file might look like and the way documents are arranged: "There's my initial request to the carriers, their questions back to me and my response to those questions. Then comes the revised quote and my advice to the carriers to either bind the coverage or that I went somewhere else (to another carrier) for the coverage."
He's also noticed significant time saving, especially in policy updating. "When we get a request to add a client vehicle to a policy, we don't have to wait to receive the request by e-mail then print or save it and act on it somewhere else," Crystal explains. "It's all in one self-contained system and what might have been an eight-step process is now three steps."
Account executives, finding themselves freed from paperwork tasks they no longer have to do for their clients, are now focusing more on service, he says.
Having completed a three-month pilot of Riskclick, the Crystal Company plans to fully integrate the product into its commercial operations, he says.
Toledo, Ohio-based Hylant Group has been using Riskclick since last November to fill out communications capabilities in its network of broker partners subcontracted to service the overseas operations of Hylant's multi-national accounts, according to Rich Yarborough, international vice president. Hylant had wanted to adopt a uniform technology platform that could be used by all its broker partners but found the costs were excessive, he recalls.
Keeping information up to date with overseas insurance programs is a "very cumbersome process involving a great deal of back and forth movement to make sure all documents are the latest versions," he says.
Along came Riskclick, however, and great speed and efficiency have been added to document updating, questionnaire completion for local insurance regulators and other critical information tasks. "We needed to find a way to serve our multinational accounts, but we didn't want to build a technology system," says Yarborough. But Riskclick, "being totally Web-based and requiring no software, allows from day one for each of our partners, no matter what they're doing, to be involved in handling business within our network.
"We all know we're working with only one document and the system allows us to understand who signed the document out, who is in possession of it at a given time and what version of a document we're currently working with. We can always go back and catalog all the changes made to the document which is important from an E&O standpoint," he explains.
Hylant also plans to extend Riskclick use to its domestic customers. Yarborough says he also plans greater use of the electronic submission features in the near future.
Green points to the basic bottom-line advantage of a product like Riskclick or simply enabling your brokerage to transact business online. "You can leverage your people resources and free them up to do the higher-level value added services like working with clients and exploring new ideas and markets," he says. "You can have a much more sophisticated relationship with your client." *
The author
John Maes is a freelance writer based in Elk Grove Village, Illinois.
For more information:
Contact: Jim MooreE-mail: jmoore@riskclick.com
Phone: (646) 452-8181
Web site: http://www.riskclick.com