Selective Launches Flood Insurance Spin-Off

Branchville, NJ-based holding company Selective Insurance Group announced the launch of FloodConnect, LLC(Sparta, NJ), a third-party administrator that provides enhanced service to "Write Your Own" (WYO) carriers that participate in the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP), through the use of object-oriented, Web-based technology.

The subsidiary provides policy administration, underwriting, claims, customer service, premium collection, data entry and financial and statistical reporting services through FloodConnect.com, a product developed by PDA Software (Overland Park, KS), another Selective company.

Terry Black, FloodConnect sales manager at, PDA, says the product provides carriers and agents with the ability to quickly adapt to the continually changing NFIP and evolving technologies.

When the NFIP announces program changes, it presents a challenge, Black says. "In the older code bases you have to go in line-by-line and make the change every place a particular item is used," he says. "Because of our object methodology, we normally can make that change in one or two places and it's populated throughout the rest of our program. We're making the assumption we're going to have to integrate more and more with different systems and we believe the object-oriented technology is much more adaptive."

Selective has announced that it will make the FloodConnect.com product available to other WYO carriers. "This is really a big win for the industry because flood insurance is complex; you're working with the federal government, which has very defined standards," Black says. "Anything that can help make this process better and easier for the WYO carrier, the agent and ultimately the customer-is a big advancement."

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