A growing number of life insurance distribution firms have begun adopting electronic data feeds to help them keep track of both pending and in-force insurance policies, according to executives at managing general agencies (MGAs) and other distributions firms who spoke at the Canadian Life Insurance EDI Standards (CLIEDIS) annual seminar in Toronto on Thursday.
Although there have been challenges in implementing the data feeds, the initiative is improving productivity and could help to generate new sales opportunities for advisors, some executives point out.
“There’s a hunger and a thirst in the distributor community … not just to start to figure out the existing feeds that are available today, but to get more feeds,” said Andy Cunningham, vice president of information technology at PPI Financial Group.
Life insurance carriers have been working with CLIEDIS over the past several years to build standardized data feeds with information about insurance applications that have been submitted, the status of pending policies and details about in-force insurance policies. Some carriers have already introduced feeds containing all of those data while others are at various stages of the process of launching those feeds.
Providing distribution firms with access to these feeds prevents them from having to manually input this kind of data, said Al Knight, department leader at Mississauga, Ont.-based Edward Jones. That means staff can focus on ensuring applications get processed more quickly, which means advisors get paid sooner, he said.
These data — particularly related to in-force policies — could also help advisors identify opportunities for sales and policy conversions, said Heather Clarke, vice president of I.G. Insurance Services Inc.
“We are using the feeds in different ways; we’re not just putting them into our back-office systems,” she said. “We are starting to use them in our [customer relationship management] systems; we are building a database that we will be rolling out to our advisors — and that’s going to result in sales.”
Although the data are helpful, there have been some hurdles to implementing the feeds. Specifically, it takes some work to analyze the data and make sense of them, Clarke said: “We didn’t realize what needs to be done.”
In some cases, firms may need to hire new staff members to help them manage the data, she added.
“You can’t just expect your case administrators to be able to use that data,” Clarke said. “As you’re thinking about implementing these feeds, you have to think about what your organization has to look like, and some of the skill sets of the people on your team might have to change.”
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