The fight for market share and retaining talented insurance agents is heating up in the managing general agency market. But David Baird is ready to take it to the next level with new technology that he believes will provide him with an edge over many MGAs.

Baird is president of Waterdown, Ont.-based Ten Star Financial Services, which runs 30 insurance branches across Canada and is one of the first companies to pilot a new program from Toronto-based Univeris Corp. It is designed to provide his agents with an automated way of processing their policies and managing their clients’ financial affairs from a single platform.

“We work mostly with external independent financial advisors and life insurance agents and brokers,” Baird says. “We’re an MGA for several insurance companies and that makes it easy for the advisors, because they have to access so many insurance companies.”

He adds: “Our business has become extremely competitive. We have to improve our efficiency and workflow.” He hopes the Univeris product will do just that.

For more than 10 years, Univeris has provided financial advisors with an enterprise wealth-management solution; more than 15,000 advisors, who manage more than $64 billion in assets, are licensed to use the platform through their dealers. It is geared to Investment Dealers Association of Canada member firms and Mutual Fund Dealers Association of Canada-licensed advisors. It features a range of technology tools that allow advisors to do everything from managing financial instruments such as mutual funds, stocks and bonds, to account and asset aggregation, client reporting, portfolio rebalancing and compliance.

The new insurance component will complement the existing lineup, says Carmine Tullio, president and CEO of Univeris.

The insurance distribution market has changed substantially over the years. Tullio notes that today most MGAs, national insurance agencies and carriers sell both wealth and insurance products. In fact, more than 50% of advisors currently using the Univeris platform sell both insurance and mutual funds. So it makes sense to provide a single platform for advisors to manage both ends of their business.

When it comes to technology, the insurance industry has been shortchanged compared with the capital markets, where many of the processes have been automated.

But that is changing. Forrester Research expects that North American insurance carriers will increase total spending on information technology by 7% this year, vs 5% in 2006. The top two priorities will be spending on technology to improve efficiency and create innovation, Forrester vice president and principal analyst Marc Cecere writes in a report.

Research firm TowerGroup has identified four factors that will impact insurance firms in the coming years and force them to look more closely at technology solutions:

> an aging population that will affect both clients and insurance companies as agents retire en masse;

> workforce motivation and the need to use technology to create a responsive, adaptive and satisfied workforce;

> mobile technology, which is experiencing significant growth as the Internet proliferates, creating challenges for companies that need to stay in touch with workers and customers; and

> service-oriented architecture, a computing architecture that allows different types of computing applications to communicate to create a new service or application that further improves the company’s operation.

There is much room for improvement in the insurance industry. One of the biggest problems is lack of automation when it comes to the policy process, which opens the door to errors.

For example, Baird says, the insurance application workflow process is fraught with a “great deal of duplication.” An agent meets with a client, creates a file and types in the key information about the client. A hard copy is usually passed on to the insurance carrier. Baird says insurance carriers “duplicate what we do and are prone to errors.”

The info is passed back to the agent, who must then correct any errors. “It’s very inefficient going back to the client to get more information,” Baird says.

He says Univeris “can eliminate all this duplication,” because the data are entered once into the system and those electronic data are used by the carriers to complete their end of the task. Safeguards prevent information from being improperly overwritten. “It eliminates all those potential errors that are made at every level. That’s very, very appealing to use and a great benefit to the advisor.”

@page_break@“What we’re bringing to the market is one view,” Tullio says. “It all operates off the same data.”

Maggie Dew, an insurance business analyst at Univeris, says insurance advisors “will be able to see in real time where that application is sitting. If there’s a roadblock, they’ll be able to facilitate it a lot more quickly.”

Richard Binnendyk, Univeris’s executive vice president, says the system was developed with input from all insurance industry levels, including MGAs and carriers.

There were three objectives:

> to improve the workflow process and operational efficiencies in order to lower costs;

> to reduce the amount of paper and administrative steps; and

> to help brokers develop business by creating a “client-centric” practice-management application.

The system knits together the workflow processes and becomes the central nervous system and conduit for communication among the various parties in the insurance process. It links the advisor to internal or third-party manufacturers, and allows call centres, branches or headquarters to connect through the Web to access the data.

Baird says one of the big attractions is the compliance aspect of the system: “The compliance modules are extremely important.” The system allows advisors to manage both the underwriting and investment processes so that properly licensed advisors can provide clients with everything from segregated funds to GICs, mutual funds and even individual securities. The compliance system conducts a trade suitability review process of an investor’s “know your client” profile. “The system,” says Baird, “can handle seg funds and all the life insurance products.”

The insurance module integrates with the Univeris wealth-management platform and provides advisors with an array of real-time reports covering everything from administration and management to marketing.

Pricing is based on the number of users and modules acquired.

Baird, whose firm is now testing the system, says: “It makes us far more efficient and should make agents’ paperwork flow much easier and simpler. It gives them far more time for prospecting.” IE