BOSTON–(BUSINESS WIRE)–SCF Arizona, the leading provider of workers’ compensation insurance in Arizona, and Sword Insurance, the leading provider of web-based product distribution solutions to the property and casualty insurance industry, today announced that Sword will provide its best-in-class software solutions and experienced professional services staff to help SCF implement a new online distribution platform that will support its strategic business expansion.
As a result of new state legislation, SCF Arizona is currently undergoing a complete business transformation, expanding beyond a state insurance fund to a mutual insurance company. Additionally, SCF Arizona will expand its product offering beyond the current workers’ compensation coverage, with regional territory expansion expected in the future. The most immediate change will involve increased focus on the independent agent sales channel.
To support this transition, SCF Arizona requires a technology platform that is flexible and reflects its commitment to making it easy for different distribution channels to do business with the company. SCF has licensed Sword Insurance’s web-based platform AgencyPortal™, the AgencyPortal ToolKit, and the off-the-shelf Workers’ Compensation web portal template. SCF Arizona will launch new business web rate, quote and bind first, then follow with endorsements, renewals and policyholder self-service using these solutions.
“After an extensive review of our technology infrastructure and the vendor market, we realized that Sword Insurance had the best combination of technologies and staff experience for our needs,” said Rick Jones, Senior Vice President, Chief Sales & Business Development Officer at SCF Arizona. “As our business transformation takes place, we need to be able to meet the evolving market and channel needs quickly, and we want to be recognized for providing our customers with the best quality service. Sword Insurance’s extensive experience in delivering distribution solutions makes it a natural choice.”
SCF Arizona will also utilize Sword’s recently launched Turnstile™ service to automatically handle new business submissions from agents whose ACORD forms are attached to e-mails. Instead of having to re-key the submission data into one or many systems, the Turnstile™ subscription web service takes data from many ACORD forms and converts them into a single stream of ACORD XML, which is then passed to rating, policy and other systems at SCF. A clean, simple and ultra secure complementary service to a carrier’s agent portal, Turnstile™ shortens the time agents have to wait on quotes, improving SCF’s chances of binding new business.
“Multichannel distribution is an important but complex workflow to automate online, but we have done it over one hundred times with our customers and delivered measureable ROI in the process,” said Mason Power, Head of Product and Market Strategy at Sword Insurance. “SCF Arizona is taking advantage of the latest features in AgencyPortal including real-time producer to underwriter collaboration, and the newly-launched Turnstile™ service. We look forward to supporting SCF Arizona as a technology partner during its strategic transformation, and for many years to come.”
SCF Arizona will go live with the new portal in several phases, with internal testing beginning in the fourth quarter of 2011.
Source: BusinessWire