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AGENCY SERVICE IS KEY

Company enhances electronic submission process to
"leap-frog" competing carriers

"What previously was a multi-day submission and issuance
process with many manual steps now is a single, integrated
procedure that processes the work in one day."

By Dr. Clark Sykes, Vice President, Information Technology, Merchants Insurance Companies

Get connected! That's the message agencies have been giving their systems suppliers and carriers for years. Until relatively recently, however, the industry has been slow to embrace EDI tools and to commit to integrated SEMCI solutions for their customer's benefit. The marketplace demand for greater cost effectiveness and processing efficiency has caused system vendors and carriers to invest more heavily in EDI, and activity in this area has dramatically increased over the past two years.

In 1998, Merchants began the development of an innovative new program, MerLink^TM, to allow Merchants' agents to submit policies from their own agency management systems over the IVANS network, and to have these submissions automatically update Merchants' internal system. Merchants' non-proprietary SEMCI solution is based upon leading-edge tools provided by APT and Applied Systems. In designing our upload and download solution, our overriding goal has been to streamline the workflow in submitting insurance transactions to us and thereby make it as easy as possible for our agencies to do business with Merchants.

While it is the cornerstone of the streamlined agency-company business interaction, SEMCI alone is not sufficient to optimize the workflow process. In conjunction with MerLink, Merchants has implemented an automated underwriting process, so that the policies submitted electronically will be automatically underwritten and, if the risk is acceptable, the physical policy will be automatically printed and sent to the insured and agent. An electronic confirmation of the transaction also is automatically returned to the agency via e-mail or fax, and the transaction is downloaded back to the agency's system. MerLink provides a dramatic improvement in processing efficiency and service and has been very well received by our agencies.

"While SEMCI upload and download is not unique to Merchants, they have leap-frogged many other carriers with MerLink," says Eric Slocum of The Knight Agency, Arcade, New York. "Merchants is doing it right. MerLink is very user friendly, doesn't take long to learn, and generally represents a much easier way to do things. I would recommend it to any agency seriously looking at optimizing their interaction with Merchants and other carriers," Eric adds.

To date, Merchants has implemented MerLink for homeowners, personal auto and workers compensation. Over the next few months, we will be introducing MerLink for BOP and commercial automobile, and later for other commercial and personal lines. The launch of MerLink for these product lines is consistent with the company's business strategy of focusing upon small commercial and personal business.

Merchants plans to MerLink enable at least 125 of its premier agencies by the end of 1999; to date, over 80 agencies have implemented MerLink and have begun submitting homeowners, personal auto, and workers compensation new business applications. Once received by Merchants' system, the vast majority of these applications are electronically processed, underwritten, and issued the same day they are submitted, with the updated policy data downloaded to the agency's agency management system the next day. Only exceptions to our risk guidelines are referred to our underwriters for review. What previously was a multi-day submission and issuance process with many manual steps now is a single, integrated procedure that processes the work in one day.

For Merchants' agencies, SEMCI is a reality. *