Agencyport also features on the P&C Deal Trends “Leading Vendors” chart which reflects deal volumes in the Distribution metacategory.

This is our 5th appearance in the annual report.

Speak with an Agencyport client about their experience and the difference that Agencyport’s software can make in their quest to satisfy agents, customers and to grow their market share.

2007: Hiscox strikes first by signing with Agencyport for its Hiscox Data Exchange

2008: Agencyport and Hiscox donate exposure data model to ACORD, published as the ER 3001 standards

2009-2010: Other managing agents in Lloyd’s evaluate vendors; scope of binder management system requirements expands; Lloyd’s acts to provide information and support for managing agents, wholesale brokers and coverholders

2011: Lloyd’s Coverholder Technology Forum features nearly 30 vendors; Managing Agents publish tenders for binder management systems; Agencyport launches Alchemy 2.0 to combine the leading functions of bordereau processing (formerly CoverIQ) and binder management (based on years of experience with syndicates at Lloyd’s and companies in London)

2012: Two vendors emerge as finalists in most selections: Agencyport and Watertrace.

May 2012: Agencyport releases Alchemy 2.1 which adds more functionality that is unique to Alchemy (not in other vendor systems but required in every tender we see) and also adds functionality Alchemy had been missing relative to Watertrace and other vendors.

With 2.1, Alchemy is more complete than other products, the Alchemy web offers the best web user experience (based on Agencyport’s twelve years of building web solutions) and with the Agencyport team in the UK and the US ready to support carriers and their coverholders, we invite you to learn more and see Alchemy 2.1 in action.

We’re proud to announce that Generali Global Risk has gone live on Open Co+, replacing a legacy system for underwriting, claims and accounting. The project was complex and the data migration was enormous:

The legacy platform was implemented in 1963, a year when the Beatles released their first album (Please Please Me), and NASA launched the first space shuttle. Over 39 million historical technical account records, over 3.6 million historical claim movements and approaching 800,000 policies were migrated to Open Co+.

We’ve been working with European customers for 4+ years on distribution technology solutions (e.g. broker portals, coverholder portals, cedant portals, and a variety of XML interfaces) and are investing more of our resources to meet the demand in Europe for more software products.

We’ve worked with PwC globally since 2005 and have teamed up as co-lead sponsors for an important conference on insurance distribution next week in Berlin. If you’re interested in learning what other insurance companies are doing to write more business online, it’s not too late to register. To get a sense of the content, there’s an agenda you can download and we summarized some of the points made by other speakers in a blog post from last year’s conference.

We’re running a survey of delegates to the show asking what they currently offer in online self-service for their producers and clients and what they plan to offer in the near-term. It will be the second annual survey and we’re eager to see how the results differ from last year. For a copy of the results, please contact me.

Along with PwC, we hope to see you in Berlin or open a discussion with you about your specific needs. Let us know how we can help.

Chris chose to support NSPCC ChildLine as he himself faced difficult challenges and needed support during his childhood and, as sailing changed his life and allowed him to focus on realising his potential, he hopes to both inspire and help disadvantaged young people.

He’s not doing it the easy way. His aim is to break the world record for circumnavigating mainland Britain single-handedly in a beach catamaran. The current record of 28 days was set by a team of two in 2006. Chris aims to do it in 25 days, sailing for around 10 hours a day in a 17 foot open racing boat. To be honest, rather him than me!

We were impressed by the dedication and drive of this young man and his mantra, “be inspired to achieve” – adopted from his close friend who was tragically lost in a sailing accident last year. His mantra resonates with us as a company. Agencyport is all about pushing the boundaries of insurance technology and aiming to inspire our people, customers and partners to achieve. As a result, Agencyport is sponsoring the catamaran and helping Chris raise as much money as possible.

We held a fantastic launch event at St. Katharine’s Dock last week where we proudly unveiled the catamaran with the Agencyport logo on its sail and hull. We also unashamedly encouraged customers and partners to sign up for a table at our flagship fund raiser, the Agencyport Quiz Night on the 17^th May.

Tickets can be bought for the quiz night at by checking out our event website.  You will also be able to track Chris’s progress here, once he sets sail on 31^st May.

Meanwhile, donations can be made at the Just Giving site created  for Chris’s journey.

It would be great if you can join us in supporting this exciting and inspirational challenge.

We would like to take a moment to thank our customers for completing this year’s ACE surveys. Because they did, we received Novarica’s Gold Ranking status by having ten customers review a specific solution. Even better, both AgencyPortal and AgencyConnect solutions were ranked high in the areas of Staff, Organization, Function and Technology, receiving overall scores of 94 and 96 on a 100 point scale, respectively. Additionally, we received 95 out of 100, and AgencyConnect received 98 out of 100 in the category of Overall Customer Satisfaction.

The ACE Rankings are not only valuable for the industry to learn firsthand what users/customers really think of solution providers products but we truly value the honest feedback on how our customers feel we are doing.  One customer commented that they “do not consider Agencyport a vendor, but a strategic business partner.”  That means a lot to us.  We take the word partnership seriously. No one knows insurance better than our customers. No one knows insurance on the web better than we do. What better formula for success is there?

I’ve been working with accounts as part of the AAMGA community for longer than I am comfortable admitting (decades…) and having switched from Oracle and policy issuance/document management to Agencyport and portals/GA interface, it’s still about the data.

Thanks to our E&S Carriers and MGA friends who came by our booth to gain an understanding of our solutions for the US and London markets. There was much discussion around integration, data exchange, web services, data standards (ACORD XML), and converting PDF applications to ACORD XML.

One of the main messages we heard from carriers and MGAs was the need for vendors to work together to solve the data interchange within the distribution channel.  At Agencyport we live for automation and ease of doing business including for clients today the E&S market, so that fact that many folks in the E&S world are still working with bad data or getting stuck with manual rekeying is frustrating.

We saw a ton of interest in form-to-XML conversion and our Turnstile product because retailers start the workflow with PDF forms. We’ve got demos for Turnstile and AgencyConnect (GA interface for E&S) and AgencyPortal (because point of sale solutions should handle all inbound submissions including from ACORD forms, ACORD XML, or keyed into the carrier website).

Good to be back in the E&S market with a new set of solutions.

From my perspective, the portal and interface vendor competition is clearly gunning for us from a functional standpoint, but it was interesting to see that AgencyPortal/AgencyConnect are the only portal and agency interface solutions built entirely based on Java.  This is an important feature because our Java-based web portal solution, AgencyPortal, is deployable on virtually any web platform.  Java also ensures compatibility within a carrier’s existing technical platform and safeguards against potential support issues as their platform evolves over time.

Additionally, our solution was the only one I encountered that was architected for unlimited scalability and supported all the popular relational databases. Surprisingly enough, at least to me, the portal competition had architected their solutions on Microsoft’s .NET web platform as well as Microsoft’s back-office database products and format.  For certain product sets (like our core system Open Co+), .Net makes a lot of sense, but for front-ending these, it’s best to use Java.

The answers to those of us who have worked in the Lloyd’s and London market, particularly on coverholder automation, were predictable/standard: “Lloyd’s is actually roughly 80 carriers, there are dozens of brokers, everyone has different needs.” What was unsaid by the panel was “We have been giving you standardized templates for years and you either don’t use them or your MGA management system doesn’t output in that format yet.”

Coverholder automation is a two-sided coin so I asked a question of the coverholders and vendors to coverholders about whether they output XML. The response was “yes, but nobody in London can handle it.” That’s why the world has conferences like this – the panel and Agencyport responded that our binder management product Alchemy does just that along with other products on the market in London.

I’ve reached out to several of the MGA management system vendors at this conference about partnering so that we can connect our customers in London with them, especially where we can use XML and not .xls or .csv bordereau reports. (Catlin’s panel representative reported that the London market has concluded that XML is the true path forward.) Please contact me if you are a coverholder or a vendor to coverholders – we can get the XML in place, further coverholder automation and even donate the standard to ACORD (it’s what we did with Hiscox for what is now ACORD ER3001, the exposure standard for North American property business).

Lloyd’s reported that 30% of its premium comes from 2,500 global coverholders including over 800 in the US so this is an important topic getting a ton of attention in London. Incidentally, the managing agents on the panel said the U.S. coverholders are already the most automated and easiest to do business with, and both sides expressed interest in further improvements.