EIS Group, whose platform has a modern
technology stack that was scalable to meet
the growing needs of CSAA Insurance
Group. The insurer sought real-time processing in order to effectively do business
in the digital world and allow customers
to help themselves.
“The key for us was going from nine
policy administration systems to one
streamlined policy system. Each legacy
system was costing millions to maintain
per year, so there was no questioning the
economic argument for doing this,” says
Valliere. “But for us, it was about more
than just cost savings. We needed a us-er-friendly system in order to improve the
productivity of sales agents, the efficiency
of service agents, and allow customers to
make changes by themselves,”
Consumer Expectations
For years, most insurance business has
been conducted with agents, but Kruck
points out carriers increasingly are
talking to customers directly and serving
up information and transactions directly
to them.
“Customer expectations are high,” he
said. “No longer is ‘OK’ good enough. Ex-
pectations aren’t set by us; they are set by
the consumer experiences with everyone
else they do business with. If your policy
system has things it can’t do or has never
done but could add value to your custom-
ers, that’s going to be a problem. That’s
what the industry is running into.”
Kruck believes change is going to
accelerate throughout the insurance
industry and Security First Insurance
has anticipated it. “We pushed ourselves
to adopt technology sooner,” he says.
“We expect to be one of the companies
that will help disrupt rather than react to
disruption.”
If you look at macro trends over the
last decade the notion of consumerism
has taken shape. Rather than insurers and
agents telling consumers what they’ll get,
the concept has flipped.
“Consumers are telling companies
what they want and how they want to
get insurance,” says Petersmark. “From a
consumer expectation perspective, that’s a
daunting task.”
Availability, accessibility, and the
millennial market are all big drivers, adds
Petersmark. Each year, more insurance
agencies are being taken over by younger
people who are looking for a change.
“The producers they bring in have the
same expectations as new consumers,” he
says. “Younger producers don’t have the
patience to work with a carrier’s legacy
system. The third leg of the stool is IT
talent. You are not going to keep people
working on 30-year-old systems. If your
systems are not positioned to the outside
world—distribution to customers and
consumers—employees are going to go
someplace else.”
No Legacy
Kruck points out Security First Insur-
ance has not had the legacy technology
issues that other insurance companies
have faced through acquisitions or trying
to move business from three or four
operating systems into one. “We sought
to avoid some of the things I’ve seen
in bigger companies as our company
grows,” he says.
Security First Insurance has a BI
system, which makes reporting transparent. The insurer has been able to move the
technology where it was needed without
creating inefficiencies. Implementing a
new system creates its own set of problems, though.
“Any time you change your policy
system you freeze the business for 12 to
18 months to make the changeover,” says
Kruck. “In the past, companies exported
policy data from the old system into the
new system. We are using APIs to do that
so the messy business of transferring from
“For us, it was about more than just
cost savings. We needed a user-friendly system in order to improve
the productivity of sales agents, the
efficiency of service agents, and
allow customers to make changes by
themselves.”
Robert Valliere, CSAA Insurance Group
