Policy Do-It-YourselfersWith a new policy administration system, Providence Washington aims for its agents to get close to 80 percent of their policies issued electronically with no carrier intervention.

Providence Washington Insurance Companies is a New England-based property/casualty insurer that saw the need for establishing a Web presence, not only for its independent agents, but for the internal staff as well. When we made that decision we had various goals in mind, says Ed Leveille, vice president systems and CIO. What-ever we did, though, had to be faster to market. We also wanted to make the system as close to 100 percent self-service as possible. And we also wanted to make it totally open for communication with third parties.

Unfortunately, Leveille was unable to find a system that could do everything he wanted. The insurer decided instead to build the system internally, but some outside tools also would be needed. I kind of gambled that Web services and XML are going to be the wave of the future, he says. If we stored all the information in XML, we could cut down significantly on the number of transformations and loading steps between systems.