IASA Trend Watch: Mobile

Product launches reveal that insurers are demanding mobility solutions above all else from the vendor community.

At the media reception that took place shortly before the opening of the IASA Annual Conference and Business Show in National Harbor, Md., association president Mark Roth outlined a number of emerging trends he had seen in talking to the vendor attendee community. Big data, analytics and reinsurance were mentioned -- but over the past 48 hours, my conversations have revealed a continuing focus on mobile.

In a chat with Janeen Blanton, VP of insurance productivity services for Salient, she told me that the company's newly launched mobility "center of excellence" will focus on finding insurance applications for a platform that transmits data from any source to any device with high levels of security, for both internal and external mobile business cases.

"This was built for the FBI, so carriers don't have to worry about that," she said. "In the federal space, we've been working on mobility for 14 years."

WSI, the b-to-b division of the Weather Company, offers a number of mobile alert products that insurers can use to connect to their policyholders at times of peril. Insurers are looking for more opportunities to reach their customers because "there's quite a lot of information out there that the more touchpoints insurers have with their customers, the more loyal they are," says WSI product manager Ray Hawthorne.

Other mobile launches this week include:

Two new apps from BeyondKey: B365, which allows access to agent business needs on the go; and PropertyLoc, which lets agents or homeowners create a photo inventory of every asset associated with a policy, file claims and receive push notifications for every key event related to a policy.
UNIT4's Business Analytics Viewer, a tablet app that provides users with a simple view of their business intelligence and corporate performance management applications; and Tasks, for iOS, which facilitates approval of invoices, purchase orders, requisitions and other financial documents.
KeyMark's Forms inMotion, which allows users of Apple or Windows tablets to get form updates, fill them out, and submit them using that type of device.

Nathan Golia is senior editor of Insurance & Technology. He joined the publication in 2010 as associate editor and covers all aspects of the nexus between insurance and information technology, including mobility, distribution, core systems, customer interaction, and risk ... View Full Bio