Kingsway Implements Insurity's End-To-End Property Casualty Solution

Hartford, CN - Kingsway Financial Services Inc., a large property-casualty insurer in the U.S. and Canada, has completed the first stage of its companywide implementation of Insurance Decisions, the end-to-end insurance processing application from ChoicePoint's Insurity. Insurance Decisions will provide rating, quoting, underwriting, issuance, billing, reinsurance, claims administration, management-reporting and bureau-reporting services for Kingsway.

Kingsway's Lincoln General subsidiary, North America's largest truck insurer, began issuing commercial policies utilizing Insurance Decisions just five months after implementation began, said Claude Smith, vice president and chief information officer of the Mississauga, Ontario-based company. The initial installation included policy, claims, billing and back-end reporting systems for three major lines of business, Smith noted, with the remaining lines scheduled to be completed by the end of August.

"Everything has been right on schedule and the users love it," Smith said.

The Lincoln General implementation is the first step in consolidating 23 systems at 12 operating companies into one enterprise system. All applications will be hosted at Insurity's data center. The system ultimately will support thousands of employees and independent agents in the U.S. and Canada.

"Insurity's products, resources, depth and breadth of services support our strategic objective for application consolidation and centralization," Smith said. "Insurity's mature offering has functionality not found in other systems. There's nothing missing. It supports virtually everything we need, handling large auto fleets easily. We're getting flexibility, adaptability and "speed to markets" as we pursue our dynamic business strategy for new companies, new partners, new products, new jurisdictions and new distribution channels."

Implementation Faster than Expected
Before selecting Insurity, Smith said he was concerned that implementing a system that met all of Kingsway's functional requirements – one that would be scalable, enterprise-wide and Web-enabled – would take "forever," because Kingsway's 12 companies all had to be converted to the new enterprise system. But he said Insurity delivered the initial implementation in about half the time he had expected: "We looked at Insurity's track record for implementing systems and found that they have a very good reputation for quick deployment, and that was important to us," Smith said, "because of the number companies involved."

The quick implementation was the result of several factors. "Insurity has a real understanding of the property-casualty business," he said. "They are experts in our business, and we're dealing with people who really know what they're talking about."

Insurity's unique implementation methodology and its close teamwork with Kingsway staff were also central to the quick deployment and "drove the process forward much faster," according to Smith. "Our companies are clamoring to get started, and we've already started the conversion process with two more subsidiaries."

SOURCE: Kingsway Financial Services Inc.