From Concept to Execution: Winning Ideas

Since its creation just five years ago, MarketScout’s Entrepreneurial Insurance Symposium in Dallas has grown into a unique forum for insurance industry innovators. Each year, insurance entrepreneurs share their stories of success, as well as the challenges they encountered on their journeys, to hundreds of attendees.

At the MarketScout 2011 Entrepreneurial Insurance Symposium, 11 finalists presented their ideas to the panel of EIA judges and symposium attendees. The following factors determined each candidate’s scores: applicability to the insurance industry; impact on a broader marketplace; financial implications; unique features; and judges’ discretion of other relevant factors.

The 2011 Entrepreneurial Award winners for this year are: LexPlorations, created by Lexington Insurance, in the underwriting category; PC Central from Huntington Insurance in the distribution category; and Insurance360 by Risk Metrics, and WorkSmart from Vertafore in the technology category.

LexPlorations from Lexington Insurance is designed for exploring in-depth information on current market issues, emerging risks and innovative solutions, according to its creators. It provides objective perspectives from renowned industry and subject matter experts on a variety of topics such as data breaches, green and sustainable design, or the impact of health reform on the medical liability market. Through LexPlorations, brokers and clients are able to access information on the latest risk management issues and solutions to address them.

WorkSmart is “a tool for agencies to manage their staffs and their business processes,” says Susanna Morgan, senior vice president of corporate development at Vertafore. Launched in 2010, it combines content management, business process management, workflows and reporting, allowing agencies to “create more capacity,” she says. Around 50 agencies are currently using it. “We’ve had amazing results from our clients, things like reducing the number of steps and the times spent on common processes by about 50 percent, which is an amazing result,” she says.

Property Casualty Central, or PC Central, from Huntington Insurance is an agency knowledge management system that allows information to be shared with employees in wide-ranging locations, according Jeff Gillmor, vice president. Huntington has offices across four states and wanted to share communication among people and locations. Having served in the military, Gillmor drew upon communication strategies employed by U.S. forces to disseminate information in developing PC Central. Gillmor says it took about six months to go from concept to execution and another six months to refine it.

Insurance 360 is an expansion of Risk Metrics’ existing dataset, explains Kevin McCarthy, vice president of national accounts. At the same time it’s a new mechanism for delivery of aggregated “risk-indicative data” on U.S.-based businesses. The system can “identify what would be indicative of an insurance exposure … things like workers’ compensation coverage, commercial auto exposures, commercial property, and other factors like import-export or some specialty risks.” With Insurance 360, Risk Metris has expanded its dataset into new states and new lines by leveraging a new delivery mechanism for an application program interface, or API. An API, he says, “is just a sophisticated way of how one computer talks to another computer.”

On the Web

Visit Insurance Journal TV to access a series of video and podcast interviews with presenters and award winners at the 2011 Entrepreneurial Insurance Symposium.