In a well-attended edition to the AAIS Webinar Series, BriteCore’s Director of Product Configuration, Tricia Pattee discussed ways in which technology can support product changes, product configuration, rapid product development while giving a competitive edge.

BriteCore is an insurance platform that builds modern web-based core systems. The platform’s comprehensive toolset empowers insurers and simplifies the process of product configuration. Ms. Pattee provided three demos of the platform’s key features, including how to create a ‘ready to use’ data field in under 30 seconds, how to create a new version of a product, and how to use composition to manage document templates.

Product configuration is the development of insurance products, including product modeling, pricing, and testing. It is an essential step to success as it allows carriers to create more options for customers, create customized solutions, and more easily expand into markets.

Product configuration is composed of four primary areas: data modeling, rating, business rules, and documents and forms:

1. Data modeling involves the identification of three things: the risks for offered coverages, the data fields collected to rate and make decisions, and the insured coverages.
2. Rating Configuration involves rate tables that map to premiums and calculations that are the logic to determining premiums. This combination is easy to manage and determines the premiums, deductibles, and prices of products.
3. There are three rules essential to Configuring. First, underwriting rules determine if a quote should be submitted to underwriting or rejected altogether. Second, validation rules determine if a quote is valid. Third, behavior rules determine the behavior of the system. When thoughtfully crafted, underwriters and agents can save time by focusing on business that best suits your company.
4. Documents and Forms are essential to product configuration because they are used to generate policy documents and corresponding forms that are included when certain coverages and exclusions apply.

Once all areas are configured, insurers will see the benefits: more options to offer and an easier ability to expand their business.

When creating a new product, insurers follow a standard roadmap: idea, plan, configure, release, and monitor. Configure is the largest segment on the map, taking up the most time and money. In recent years, insurers have begun to use software to shrink the segment. This action is rapid product development, or, the leveraging of technology to increase the speed of configuration and decrease time to market. rapid product development brings great benefits such as the ability to experiment without significantly impacting timelines without interrupting, easier regulatory compliance, and the ability to be more adaptable.

Rapid product development manifests through six strategies: User-Friendly Interfaces, Inheritance, Versioning, Rate Testing, Product Templates, and Composition.

• User-friendly interfaces are what users see when using software. According to Ms. Pattee, software should have high usability and be safe, efficient, and effective. These characteristics empower users to make complex decisions, increases user productivity, and lowers costs. This shift has been shown to increase user performance and productivity by 161%.
• Inheritance requires insurers to define shared risk types other products have inherited. By doing this, insurers can easily make changes in multiple states and segment products by rating variables, enabling content analysts to create common product definitions and use them across numerous products. This removes repetition and reduces opportunities for error and will also allow insurers to easily make changes across all 50 states, rather than making individual changes.
• Creating new versions requires time to process. However, by versioning, changes can be made safely minimally and quickly, for in BriteCore’s software, users can experiment with changes and prepare for them effectively.
• Rate Testing involves the testing of premiums immediately after making changes, retest scenarios as the product evolves and get fast feedback as to how changes to your product affect its ratings.
• Templates help insurers in a variety of ways, primarily by preventing carriers from using their own forms with their own unique language. This helps to quicken implementations and conversions and allows for easier testing. AAIS loads products from rating bureaus; once imported, carriers inherit details and customize as needed.
• Compositions involves the use of smaller, reusable components in the creation of document templates. Carriers are able to re-use sections such as headers, footers, logos, and policy information, rather than adding them all individually. This prevents repetition, allows for templates to be reused, and gives carriers the ability to alter many templates at once.
  

Through the utilization of rapid product development strategies to hasten product configuration, carriers will be able to race ahead of their competitors, expand into more territories, experiment without impacting the timeline, meet regulatory compliance more easily, and be more adaptable.

AAIS helps its Members maintain compliance, manage new coverages, and customize configurations to their benefit, working with BriteCore to simplify these processes. For more information on Product Configuration, contact your AAIS Advisor, or reach out to a representative from Britecore. And check out the webinar replay here.