By Len Strazewski
Loren Parsons is president and chief executive officer of AMS Services, Inc.
Boulder, Colorado, used to be a quiet and comfortable Western town, says Loren Parsons, president and chief executive officer of AMS Services, Inc., one of the nation's largest agency management systems providers. But the advent of new technology and Internet startup companies has transformed the town into another new tech Mecca and turned the pace from sleepy to frenetic.
The streets are more crowded than ever as technology workers commute in from new housing developments and everyone seems to be in more of a rush to arrive a little ahead of the competition.
It's a bit of a shame, says Parsons, a long-time Boulder resident who remembers when people took a little more time in their daily interactions. But that's the price of the technological revolution. Everybody has to keep up the pace.
So does Parsons, who commutes weekly from Boulder to the AMS Services headquarters in Windsor, Connecticut, to lead a company that is national in its operations, but intensely focused and competitive in its technological development. Each week, Parsons balances a schedule of in-person meetings with the AMS staff in Windsor and a wide range of virtual relationships with AMS employees and independent agency customers around the country through constant telephone conferences, e-mail and facsimile machine transmissions.
"He's amazing," says Beverly Coats, executive vice president of Colton, Downey and Hubbard, an independent agency in Jacksonville, Illinois, and immediate past president of the AMS Users' Group. "He stays constantly in touch with us about the real, practical issues of operating an agency using the latest in agency management technology. He's not one of those executives who's always talking about what's coming next while ignoring the problems we face on a day-to-day basis. He knows what agents need to do right now to get our jobs done. When we have an issue, either with the operation of technology, or the way we interact with insurers using the technology, Loren is right there with whatever we need to resolve our problems," she says.
Parsons also maintains a human touch in both real and virtual relationships, Coats says. In an era of occasional testy relationships between agencies and insurers, Parsons has personally forged links between the two parties to improve both their uses of new systems, she says.
Greg Wilkes, comptroller of the Pinckard Insurance Agency in Troy, Alabama, agrees. An AMS systems user for 23 years, the independent agency, with satellite offices in Birmingham and Montgomery, depends on its agency management system for inter-office communication and management of its diverse statewide customer base.
"Loren has always been a tremendous asset to agents and to us personally. He is more aware than anyone I have ever met in the industry of what we need to maintain the efficiency of our operation with all of this new technology. And he always returns his telephone calls," Wilkes says.
Parsons says communication is critical to his executive mission at AMS Services. Agents are part of the technological revolution and new technology is putting great pressure on them to keep up with developments in management and transactional systems, he explains.
"In large part, agents are naturally competitive, always looking for the newest and best advantage. However, in the past their most important competitive tool has been their ability to provide informed, personal service," he says. While service continues to be paramount, technology drives the demand for faster, better service and pressures agents to adopt the latest in technological tools.
"Over the next 10 years, I believe most of the new agency management system functions will be delivered by ASPs."
--Loren Parsons
But the insurance industry as a whole is always a little behind the curve in technology development, he says, and is often racing to keep up with the pace. He points out that the industry has been slow to adopt Internet-based online technology and finds itself working hard to keep up with the developments that have transformed retail sales and professional services marketing. As a result, agents, insurers and other vendors have been independently creating Internet-based sales and service systems.
"Since the mid-1990s, the Internet has become pervasive both as an insurance marketing medium for personal auto, term life and small businessowners policies, and as a transactional vehicle for agency and insurer communication," Parsons says. As consumers turn to the Internet for product information and rating and insurers build online marketing and submission systems, agents are caught up in the transformation. The result is an uncomfortable technological traffic jam and intense pressure to develop the broadest, fastest and most integrated agency management systems.
Just as he has watched the traffic jams develop in Boulder, Parsons, has witnessed these technological changes first hand. A lifetime technologist, he has risen through the ranks of high technology development inside and outside the insurance industry. Early on in his career, Parsons worked as a mainframe software developer in the banking industry and later as a systems programmer and systems engineering manager for computer manufacturers. In 1976, he co-founded CAIR Systems in Irvine, California. CAIR developed the first successful automated insurance rating software for property and casualty agents and flourished in the California market during the 1980s with its rating software, risk placement and MVR services, and agency management systems.
In 1989, Parsons joined Automation Management Group in Boulder, which developed Silver Plume, a consolidated electronic reference library for the property and casualty industry as part of a development agreement with AMS. After Silver Plume's launch, Parsons left AMG to become a vice president initially and subsequently the president of Silver Plume. He remained with Silver Plume until 1999, when he was named president of AMS Services.
In February, Parsons added chief executive officer of AMS Services to his titles as part of a corporate reorganization. AMS Holding Group announced a reorganization which resulted in four business units being designed to respond more effectively to specific customer needs, according to AMS Holdings Chairman Stephen Friedman.
The units include:
--TowerStreet, which was combined with the AMS Rating Services and Insurance Information Exchange (iiX) to focus on point of sale underwriting and ratings products and services to agents and brokers.
--Silver Plume, distributor of insurance and risk-related content to the insurance industry.
--Allenbrook, which provides policy administration software and consulting services to property and casualty insurance companies.
--AMS Services, the largest of the units, providing agency management systems to more than 9,000 agents and brokers. AMS Services products include Prime 2000, a personal computer-based agency management system for small agencies; AfW, a Windows network-based management system for mid-sized agencies; and Sagitta Browser for large agencies and brokers. Both Sagitta Browser and AfW systems allow customers limited access to their coverage and personal files over the Internet. PS4 Plus, a comprehensive commercial lines submission and sales database for large agents and brokers, is also available through AMS Services.
Last year, the company took the AfW product to a new level with AfW Online, an application services provider (ASP) version of the product that is housed in an AMS Services data center in College Station, Texas.
Agencies access the management system through their office Internet service provider and enter and retrieve customer and insurer transactional information from a hosted database maintained by AMS Services.
AfW Online has been a major breakthrough in agency management systems says Pinckard Insurance Agency's Wilkes, among other users. By tapping into an Internet-based agency management system hosted outside the agency by AMS, the agency frees its offices from multiple servers and software and avoids frequent hardware and software updates.
The online delivery of agency management services may be the wave of the future, Parsons notes. "In the past, agencies have had to replace their agency management systems every four or five years to keep up with the latest innovations in technology. This has been a necessary, but expensive and sometimes time-consuming process.
"The ASP model for delivery of technology services eliminates the need for these regular capital expenditures, re-training and the backup of customer files. AMS updates its hardware and software as needed. We do the backup and system maintenance," he explains. "The process is invisible to the agencies that access the system remotely."
Parsons says agency demand for enhanced technology can only increase in the future--particularly for the back office and customer service functions that contribute most directly to agency efficiency. He expects that most agents will demand the highest levels of performance of these functions in the most unobtrusive ways--which supports the ASP delivery model.
"Over the next 10 years, I believe most of the new agency management system functions will be delivered by ASPs," he says.
Integration with the rest of the insurance industry is also critical, Parsons says, to help avoid the traffic jam of multiple systems, standards and data protocols. In the past year, AMS Services has been aggressive in seeking relationships with other industry vendors.
In May at the annual ACORD Technology Conference, AMS Services announced an agreement with MULTICO Ratings Systems, Inc., in Kirkland, Washington, to integrate the AfW, Prime 2000 and Sagitta Browser products with the MULTICO personal lines comparative rating system.
The company later announced another agreement with Cumberland Technologies, Inc., in Tampa, Florida, to integrate the Bond-Pro surety automation system with the Sagitta Browser management system.
In April at the AMS Users' Group Conference, AMS also linked with industry networking giant IVANS, Inc., in Greenwich, Connecticut, to provide universal upload from agencies to insurance companies using AL3, XML or proprietary data protocols. "Because of the work IVANS has done with AMS download certification, they know our systems. The result is tightly integrated solutions," Parsons notes.
And with tighter integration comes a lessening of the traffic jam. *
For more information:
Web site: www.amsservices.com