Main Street America Chooses Insurity

Providing its independent agents with straight-through processing and getting new products to market more efficiently drove The Main Street America Group's selection of Insurity's Policy Decisions system. The Hartford-based vendor's product will provide the Jacksonville, Fla.-based Main Street America Group (approximately $900 million in direct written premium) with a comprehensive commercial lines policy administration system, handling underwriting, rate/quote capability, workflow and policy issuance.

The Policy Decisions system will improve upon the carrier's legacy systems, which lack protocols for interfacing with other systems and which require manual intervention for quoting, according to Joel Gelb, vice president and CIO, The Main Street America Group. Gelb says a chief driver for selecting the Insurity offering was the need to provide straight-through processing for the carrier's exclusively independent agent distribution force.

The Main Street America Group's drive to create more new and innovative products is another driver. "We feel this will enable us to launch them more efficiently," Gelb says. "As a .NET system, we think Policy Decisions positions us well for further interfacing for the kinds of external information sources and inputs we will need going forward as rating policies becomes more complex--and we want to do that in real time for our agents."

The Insurity product's capability to embed product and underwriting rules and rates provides further advantages, according to Rich Braunegg, director, The Main Street America Group. "That enables us to tailor workflow, whether for an agent, underwriter or service person, which results in further efficiencies for us," he says.

After evaluating vendors in mid-2005, the carrier began working with Insurity. Work began in January 2006, and the first phase of the implementation is planned for an as-yet unspecified date 2007. "Several vendors would have been excellent choices, but we found Insurity particularly strong with regard to our major requirements," says Gelb. "They have a very functionally rich system as well as new technology, coupled with the fact that they're a very established vendor."

Anthony O'Donnell has covered technology in the insurance industry since 2000, when he joined the editorial staff of Insurance & Technology. As an editor and reporter for I&T and the InformationWeek Financial Services of TechWeb he has written on all areas of information ... View Full Bio