Grain Dealers Mutual Deploys Insurity

To compete with larger insurers, Grain Dealers Mutual Insurance Company (Indianapolis; total assets $58,000,000) is upgrading its policy administration system with Insurity's (Hartford) Policy Decisions.

In 2004, the carrier was using a DOS-based Insurity administration system that was purchased in 1995. Working with the system became a challenge because as the market advanced toward Web-based systems and real-time transactions, Grain Dealers Mutual's IT staff did not have access to the data stored in the administration system to build a database and provide the same functionality to its independent agents, says David Patterson, director of information services for Grain Dealers Mutual. "The number one challenge was that we were not able to open up the database because we didn't have access to our own data to go in and do our own data mining," he says.

That fall, the insurer requested product information from several vendors. In December 2005, Grain Dealers Mutual decided to upgrade the Insurity policy administration system to Policy Decisions, which uses Microsoft's (Redmond, Wash.) .NET architecture. The carrier chose Insurity's Policy Decisions because the online features were comparable to the other vendors' products and it could save time during implementation by not having to convert data over to a new system. "We wanted to get from point A to point B as soon as possible, and in the end it would be less painful because we would not have to rekey all of our data," says Patterson.

With Policy Decisions, the carrier will have the ability to offer its applications to agents over the Web and automate policy issuance and rating. "In the future we want to open the system up to our agents for quoting and policy transactions," says Patterson. "We are a small company and by offering independent agents the ability to apply via the Web we can better compete with larger companies."

The carrier has been testing Insurity's Policy Decisions since July 2006 to make sure it will work with all of its commercial lines products within the nine states it covers. The carrier will start implementation in October 2006 and be fully implemented in all lines and states by December 2006.