OneBeacon Turns to CGI

Seeking to hone its competitive edge in the Massachusetts auto insurance market, Boston-based OneBeacon Insurance Group has signed a six-year agreement with CGI (Montreal, Quebec) for the outsourcing of business processing services, including policy administration, as well as the implementation of a Web front end to allow personal lines agents writing business in Massachusetts to pre-fill mandatory forms required by the Massachusetts Department of Motor Vehicles.

With a 30-year-old in-house legacy mainframe and outdated programming systems that could no longer handle the business, OneBeacon's IT department began searching for a personal lines Massachusetts auto system in 2005, according to Peter Chung, personal lines business consultant for OneBeacon Insurance Group. Though it initially considered building an in-house Web front end, the insurer ultimately decided that by outsourcing to a vendor, it could improve its data quality, use expert programmers to facilitate the annual changes within the rates and rules structures, and reallocate IT internal resources, according to Chung.

OneBeacon wanted to keep its claims, billing and print systems in-house, while handing over responsibility for programming and maintaining policy administration to a vendor. "One of our goals as a company is to make life easier for agents while at the same time protecting the company's assets, so we decided to find a vendor with programmers dedicated to the [Massachusetts] auto space," Chung says.

Leading auto industry vendors CGI and CSC (Austin, Texas) approached OneBeacon. Although both met OneBeacon's criteria, many of OneBeacon's agents were already familiar with CGI. "Well over 60 percent of the agents had CGI in their office," Chung says. "The system would also give us improved data quality and let us refocus our people on other states."

CGI's CollaborativeEdge Web front end, which is built-in to the vendor's policy admin system, provided data capture techniques that made filling forms easier and more accurate for agents, who can now run mandatory reports through the Massachusetts Department of Motor Vehicles where the driver's license or license plate numbers identify the policy holder and pre-fill information onto forms. The forms are then automatically scanned into the CGI system where the policy is produced. "Because CGI pre-fills the information from the Registry [of Motor Vehicles], we are insuring the policy information is perfect. Typically, the error ratio is less than one percent," says Chung. OneBeacon will complete converting the entire book of business of Massachusetts auto over to the CGI by January 2007.