COUNTRY Financial Goes Live on Insurity’s Policy Decisions

Bloomington, Ill.-based COUNTRY Financial and member company MiddleOak have implemented Insurity's (Hartford) Policy Decisions for Commercial Lines policy administration system. COUNTRY Financial has gone live with 10 general and specialty commercial lines in 40 states simultaneously, according to an Insurity source.

COUNTRY has consolidated products from several affiliated companies into a solution that supports multiple business units on the single Insurity platform, according to the vendor source. COUNTRY distributes its labeled products via a captive financial representative network in the Midwest and West; the MiddleOak companies—Middlesex Mutual Assurance Co. (Middletown, Conn.) and Holyoke Mutual Insurance Co. (Salem, Mass.)—are represented by independent agents nationwide.

"Policy Decisions for Commercial Lines supports both our captive and independent channels on one platform," says Anne Tarryk, SVP, distribution technology for MiddleOak. "In addition, the platform provides automatic updates for rates, rules and forms from ISO and other insurance bureaus in each state offering our companies the potential for a reduction in the time that our staff spends on maintenance work."

"The financial representative and independent agent experience is a critical success factor," Tarryk adds. "We are working toward building screens that are friendly, offering quick quotes and application data capture. We anticipate that over time our financial representatives and independent agents will quote more commercial business for us than ever before."

COUNTRY Financial has also chosen to implement Policy Decisions' Virtual Policy feature, which enables users to view forms and declaration pages online, according to the Insurity source. "Virtual Policy is an important feature of the system for us that allows policy information to be readily available across our organization," says Sheri Bane, COUNTRY Fincancial's director of Commercial/Agribusiness. "Automated forms processing is another key benefit for COUNTRY."

"This was a major project that consolidated insurance product offerings across several companies and business units," says Bob Larew, SVP, Insurity. "COUNTRY and MiddleOak worked as a team to develop a customized solution that will deliver value to the financial representative and independent agent channels that COUNTRY and MiddleOak support."

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