Financial Keyosk Allows Agents to Tap Into Sales of Financial Services

By | November 12, 2001

Financial Keyosk, a growing online financial services solution providing assistance to agents, has come on the scene with the goal of helping agents obtain carrier markets, expand products and make their businesses run more smoothly.

Established last year, Chicago-based Financial Keyosk, which offers p/c, health and banking services, is a web-enabled platform which has access to products from financial services’ organizations, licensed in 48 states.

Currently, the company, which has about 25 employees, offers products including p/c insurance services from Zurich North America and Kemper Insurance Companies, including Business Owner’s Policy (BOP), commercial automobile, workers’ compensation, errors and omissions, and umbrella and excess liability coverage.

“Our primary focus is on the smaller or rural agents who have lost contracts or can’t get contracts from national carriers,” said CEO John Dawson. “We have focused primarily on the Midwest, and we’re starting to look at agents in California and Texas. Our objective this year is to sign up 300 agents. Next year our objective is to be somewhere around 3,000. We have a sales force that goes out and signs up the agent.” According to Dawson, there is potential in both the California and Texas markets.

Dawson points out that Financial Keyosk was set up to be an alternative distribution model, to reach customers where they wanted to buy. “Traditionally insurance was only sold through agents,” Dawson explained. “Now banks, portals, associations and others are selling. As the carriers and Financial Keyosk develop their technology, we’ll have the ability to get to the SEMCI Model [Single Entry Multi-Carrier Interface].

“We’re a spin-off from Zurich North America, which is one of the pioneers in developing a web-based point of sale (POS) system called eZSB,” Dawson continued. “Currently eZSB, headquartered in Baltimore, has signed up 14,000 agents spread across the country. What it allows the agents to do is go into the application and fill it out. If all the questions are answered and match up with the edit, the agent can get a bindable quote in 20 seconds. Many of the other carriers are coming out with web-based POS. Everbody is racing to get this kind of product.

“The value we bring is to allow the agent to fill out one SEMCI application and get quotes from multiple carriers. To the agent it appears that SEMCI is available today, but in reality, it requires a CSA to intercept the SEMCI application and manually load the information into the POS systems. SEMCI is slowly becoming a reality as companies like Zurich, Kemper and St. Paul cooperate in building common applications that can map to each carriers’ POS.”

As Dawson pointed out, for some agents, the value proposition is the speed with which they can receive quotes; for others, it’s selling products they had to walk away from in the past because they didn’t have the markets. Also, some agents are interested in outsourcing the backroom so they can spend more time selling.

As far as compensation, Dawson noted, “If we take over the whole back-end process and the front-end selling process, we keep 75 percent of the commission; they get 25 percent. If they’re doing the selling and we are doing the whole back-end as far as getting quotes, etc., it might be a 50-50 split. If they’re doing the majority of the work, they may get 75 percent.”

According to Dawson, the agents own the renewal rights on the account. The agents are not required at this time to pay any fees to use the service. “As we add additional products, such as an agency management system, that provide value to them, we’ll charge,” he said. “Our objective is to have them outsource as much of their backroom as possible to us. You just go out and find the customers and sell.”

Another advantage for the agents is there are no volume requirements. “We have the contracts with the carriers, so the volume requirements are on us,” Dawson said. “We have core p/c companies who work with us, which include Kemper, Zurich, St. Paul and SAFECO. We’re trying to line up other personal markets right now, too. Our objective is to have six to seven national core markets. We also have a brokerage unit inside of Financial Keyosk so if the agent sends us something that doesn’t fit into the core market, we’ll try and place it in other markets.”

As Dawson views it, the competition for this market comes mostly from the traditional wholesalers and clusters. “There are probably five or six models out there that are good competitors,” Dawson noted. “I think we’re not completely on the radar screen, but we’re getting there.”

Topics Carriers Agencies Property Casualty

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Insurance Journal Magazine November 12, 2001
November 12, 2001
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