Employee Benefits Deal

To better serve the employee benefits marketplace, Applied Systems (University Park, Ill.) is teaming with San Francisco-based BenefitPoint to give agents using Applied Systems applications the ability to service benefits packages directly from their agency management systems.

"Most insurance carriers that we work with want BenefitPoint to proliferate because it makes the employee benefits process more efficient," says Kurt de Grosz, senior vice president of sales and co-founder or BenefitPoint. Specifically, Applied's software and BenefitPoint's employee benefits platform will integrate to allow insurance organizations using Applied software to exchange client policy data, manage employer information, access product and service details, track commissions, and perform reporting from their agency management systems.

BenefitPoint has also started discussions with ACORD (Pearl River, N.Y.) to help develop standards for employee and group medical benefits, says Grosz. "The partnership is made possible because of Web services," he adds. "It allows our applications to work together. Web services and XML is the way to go. It is the way of the future."

Greg MacSweeney is editorial director of InformationWeek Financial Services, whose brands include Wall Street & Technology, Bank Systems & Technology, Advanced Trading, and Insurance & Technology. View Full Bio