Texas All Risk General Agency Receives Special Recognition for Advancements in Technology from Nautilus Insurance Group

Dallas, TX, October 14 2015- Nautilus President Tom Kuzma presented the award at the company’s 30th Anniversary celebration in Whistler, British Columbia on September 29th. The carrier’s top MGA partners were in attendance at the Four Seasons Resort for a magnificent three day event.

Kelly Davis and David Day of Texas All Risk were thrilled to receive the beautiful bronze vase as well as the carrier’s recognition for their IT achievements. Realizing the inevitability of user demand for web-based options, the couple set out to modernize their MGA’s value added proposition – both up and down the supply chain – back in 2010. They began building their web services interface long before most carriers provided even the most basic data. Industry insiders called them early adopters but the couple saw it very differently.

“Even 5 years ago we could see that GEICO and Progressive’s ubiquitous ad campaigns were having a huge impact on the psyche of insurance consumers” says Day. “Commoditization had already become the retailer’s biggest problem. Consumers have developed such unrealistic expectations of speed and low prices that almost none of them are willing to talk about coverage. Our plan, from the beginning, was to build in the underwriting for ALL of our carriers – across all binding authority class codes – in order to provide the retailer instant access to speed and choice. We figured, rightly so, that an agent armed with multiple qualified quotes showing different premiums, forms, coverages and deductibles would Use that tool to turn the conversation back to coverage!”

Texas All Risk’s TARGET Rater platform allows the retail agent to enter the specific coverages desired after answering the mandatory questions and qualifiers for a particular risk. Agents can basically build their own surplus lines BOP. No binding information is even asked unless the agent sells a policy. But when the agent does have a buyer, she then fills out the rest of the app online, collects payment if applicable and in the case of commercial business, submits the binder request to underwriting…all through the online platform. The MGA then underwrites it a second time before binding, revising or rejecting.

Discussing the concept of modernizing an MGA’s value added proposition, Ms. Davis says, “We started with three equally important perspectives; Ours, the Carrier’s and the Retailer’s. As a result there are three main beneficiaries: First is the carrier, who gets their bread and butter risks filtered through numerous layers of underwriting before a binder is ever issued; Second is the retailer who not only gets speed and choice, she also gets the kind of ease of use that makes surplus lines a lot more profitable and thus a lot more attractive. I mean, think about it, the less times they have to touch it, the more profitable it’s going to be; and third, well, we get the same benefit as our agent and our carrier: we touch it less but write more, we double underwrite the ones we are binding so that our loss ratios stay low and we control the admin functions of the platform so we can make changes on the fly as needed.”

When asked about obstacles to quoting surplus lines via web services, Day says the biggest hurdles “…aren’t what you’d expect…it’s sort of a given that garage and inland marine aren’t realistic, but the greatest challenge we have comes from being so far ahead of the curve that retailers we don’t know yet have a hard time believing how thoroughly modern we are. That’s the downside of being an outlier! A lot of agents will still fill out three Acords and send them off to five MGAs when they could have gotten five different quotes from us in just two minutes time!”

Texas All Risk writes commercial lines and personal lines from their headquarters in Dallas, Texas.

For more information contact David Day at 972-669-1188 ext 216.

Topics Carriers Texas Agencies Tech Insurance Wholesale