SpreadsheetWEB Provides North Country Insurance Company with a Web-Based Policy Quoting System
The Business Challenge
North Country Insurance Company (NCIC) is a regional property & casualty carrier, with total premiums in excess of 8.5 million. Various insurance products, including homeowners, farmowners, commercial and liability packages, are sold by over 200 agent representatives.
Over time, NCIC had created tools to help agents accurately quote rates, but these were built as complex formulas and macros in Excel spreadsheets. These rating tools were available only by downloading them from the NCIC website, thus requiring all agents to install Excel. Since the tools were individual spreadsheets, quotes and data could not be shared between users. If any changes were made to the tools, staff had to be notified and each member would have to download the latest version.
A centralized, less error-prone, and more efficient way for agents to quote rates was needed. The new system would have to be web-based, but would also have to maintain current rating logic. Ideally, the new system would keep the Excel interface, to minimize retraining expense or error spikes.
The Solution
NCIC evaluated a number of policy quoting products on the market, but decided to license SpreadsheetWEB, primarily for two reasons:
1) SpreadsheetWEB could quickly transform Excel-based rating tools into web applications, without further programming.
2) SpreadsheetWEB was priced attractively for smaller insurance carriers
The Results
Within days, NCIC’s first Business Owners Policy (BOP) rating tool was implemented and ready for testing. By maintaining the business logic and user interface in Excel, NCIC staff could quickly make any changes requested by underwriters, and broker adoption was seamless. Quotes could be quickly calculated, saved, shared with colleagues and submitted for underwriting, all from a browser accessed securely via any internet connection.
In addition, NCIC’s IT staff took over the maintenance of the SpreadsheetWEB system after the initial deployment. They could then publish any Excel-based tools needed by other business lines without further assistance. In most cases this could be completed in hours through SpreadsheetWEB’s administrative interface.
“During the research process we encountered many solutions for our challenge. However, none were targeted for the smaller insurance carriers. We began to research the conversion of our current raters to a web based format and we came upon SpreadsheetWEB from Pagos. The SpreadsheetWEB product provided a great solution to our challenge and had pricing options affordable for smaller insurance carriers. Pagos' level of involvement from sale to implementation met our expectations and we are glad we chose to partner with them on this project”
