LIBERTY NORTHWEST NAMES WESTOVER E-BIZ HEAD

In an effort to increase its e-commerce presence, Liberty Northwest Insurance Corp. (Portland, OR), a subsidiary of Liberty Mutual, has appointed Michael Westover, former e-business strategist for Liberty International, to lead the company's e-business efforts.

Westover will oversee and facilitate the creation and implementation of e-business activities aimed toward making Liberty Northwest's e-business offerings more efficient and easier to use for customers and agents. "Ease of doing business is the rallying cry for agents and for customers," Westover says. Liberty Northwest writes workers' compensation directly and sells property and casualty insurance for business and individuals through agents. "We have to meet the needs of both the agents and the policyholders in different ways," Westover adds.

Westover's experience at Liberty International and Liberty Mutual, he says, will help him in his goals at Liberty Northwest. "With Liberty International, I worked on e-business projects for an agency force," he says. "And at Liberty Mutual I helped construct products for direct" writing of insurance.

In his new role, Westover is technically part of the Liberty Mutual organization. "I am not part of the technology unit or the marketing unit at Liberty Northwest," he says. If he is too closely tied to one area or another, Westover explains, a "department bias" may form where technology or marketing objectives gain favor.

"The reason why this position was created is because we wanted to make sure that we look at the entire portfolio of e-business offerings. Too often, work is done to meet immediate tactical solutions without taking the strategic role of e-business into account," Westover notes. "In my role, I am focused on getting the e-business requirements from users and translating that into choosing the right technology solutions across the company."

Also, Westover says Liberty Northwest is in a very competitive environment, facing Oregon's state-run workers' comp program, SAIF (State Accident Insurance Fund), and stiff competition from Seattle-based SAFECO. "We are the largest private underwriter of workers' comp in Oregon and we want to stay that way," he says. "Our competition is doing quite a bit with their e-business offering." In other product lines, SAFECO has a large Web presence, but Liberty Northwest does have an advantage. "We have to be as good as SAFECO or better and that is possible because we are smaller and we can do things differently and faster than a big company like SAFECO can."

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