Faggioni has been in the IT business his entire career, mostly with technology companies, including two tours of duty with IBM. At Scottsdale Insurance, hes responsible for 150 of the companys 1,100 employees (all at its one location, a beautiful complex of buildings in Scottsdale, Ariz.). Scottsdale has the same legacy systems, more or less, that its competitors have. Its obvious, though, that Faggionis focus is on the things the company is doing to support its wholesaler customers.

Scottsdale has undertaken a three-phase approach, which is well under way and already producing benefits for both the insurer and its wholesalers. The first phase is to improve the way it distributes static documentation. This includes things like rate pages, forms (both paper and image; the company supports the three main wholesaler policy processing systems), underwriting manuals, and the like. It now makes these available in a password-protected area of its Web site, speeding delivery and cutting printing and mailing costs.

The second part is the delivery of business information to its agents. (Scottsdale refers to its wholesalers as agents, meaning general agents and managing general agents, not retail agents.) It delivers near-real-time reports such as loss runs, claim status reports, production reports, and so forth. Its on track to deliver over 300,000 reports electronically this yearan amazing number, considering the small number of agents it deals with.

The third phase, scheduled for late this year, is to offer online rating/quoting/issuance capabilities for those agents who want to avail themselves of itand the significant cost savings it will provide them.

Scottsdale works closely with its distribution forcethe agency principals and especially the agency underwriters and CSRs. It has an agency advisory council consisting of nine key individuals who serve two-year terms. The company regularly invites agency underwriters to its offices for in-depth meetings, to make sure Scottsdale is providing what they need.

Does Faggioni like being in the insurance business? As he put itafter a minutes thoughtThe exciting thing about what were doing here is using tried-and-true IT techniques to move high impact, high value technology into a business thats traditionally been high-touch. Definitely a customer-focused individual.

Rory Read
ICW Group
By tying the companys legacy database to the Web, he streamlined and modernized the rating process.

Rory Read, senior vice president of information systems at ICW Group, is one of those guys who has spent his entire IT career in the insurance industry. Almost all of it, anyway.

Read started with Allstate in 1969, working in the Northbrook, Ill., home office until 1980. He spent two years at a startup, Bankers Multiple Line Insurance, a subsidiary of Bankers Life & Casualty, where the data center was in a converted bowling alley. (You can imagine the insider jokes that must have gone around.) He also spent another two years at PMSC (now CSC) in Columbia, S.C. He was doing some consulting work at a carrier in Northern California in 1986 when the opportunity at ICW came up, and hes been there ever since.

Ernest Rady started it in 1972, and ICW Group remains privately held today. As such, its always been able to move a little faster and be a little more nimble than some of its more traditional, larger competitors. Today, there are three companies in the group. Insurance Company of the West is the flagship company, writing mostly workers compensation, commercial property and casualty, DIC, and surety policies. Explorer Insurance Company is primarily an auto carrier, accounting for most of ICWs 3,300 agency appointments; it also writes lender-affiliated homeowners business through an MGA. Independence Property & Casualty is its third carrier. Flexibility is the key to what ICW is all about, Read says, of the different ICW operations.

For a $250 million premium company, Read and his staff of 40 have more and varied operations to support than similar-sized specialty companies have. ICW Group has 650 employees spread among 19 locationsit tries to stay close to its agentsbut all the IT operations are centralized in its San Diego home office.

Like many other carriers, ICWs primary system is a legacy system; in this case its an older Series 2 PMSC system. Its got a whole bunch of other systems that tie into the Series 2 for one function or another. For example, the company uses Insuritys Gen-A-Rate system for commercial P&C, and an in-house developed system for workers comp rating; it feeds PMSC for policy issuance and data storage. In all, Read says ICW has more than 90 systems and sub-systems, and one of his current goals is to reduce that complexity.

What Read and his team have done thats particularly impressive, and shows an innate understanding of and appreciation for its agents, is implement its Web-based Scout system for personal auto. Its significantly different from the common, enter-everything-our-way sites that so many companies have. Heres how it works:

In the real world, personal-auto insurance agents (and their CSRs) do all their work in comparative auto rating programs. New business is entered there first, and transferred to an agency management system (if the agency has one) only when the account is written. Thats why agency management system vendors like AMS, Applied, and Doris always build bridges to those systems.

In Explorers primary state, California, Fiserv FSC is the principal comparative rater, and CCI and QuickQuote are the largest in its other big states. Reads team has worked with each of these vendors to build a file-export function in the rating engine, and a matching file-import function in the Scout system, so all the information gets moved into the Web system without duplicates. Very smart. The CSR only has to enter non-rating information, such as lien holders. ICW is working with ZapApp now, which will tie into some other rating vendors.

Since its core PMSC system is simply storing information in VSAM files, ICW built a matching SQL database to which it exports data at night, allowing it to run management reports more efficiently.

Read says that supporting the varied ICW Group operations has left his team with a more complex system structure than hed like. My current goals, he says, are to simplify and consolidate some of our systems, and also to upgrade our technology.