In the insurance business, innovation is often defined by lowering premiums for customers. For Harleysville Insurance, innovation has meant much more, and as a result, the Montgomery County-based firm racked up its biggest honor to date.
The company, a leading regional provider of insurance products and services for small and mid-sized businesses and individuals, was named for the fourth consecutive year to the InformationWeek 500, the publication’s annual listing of the most innovative information technology organizations in the country. Harleysville’s No. 7 ranking was its highest.
“To be ranked among many non-insurance companies and other industries is a great honor,” says Akhil Tripathi, Harleysville’s CIO for the last five years. “Our use of technology to drive our success has been our objective for quite some time. We are starting to see positive results.”
Those results include more policies written by the roughly 1,350 independent agents with which Harleysville works exclusively using the company’s new web-based policy management system. Independent agents use multiple carriers, often reccommending products to their customers based on the best coverage, most reasonable rates and swifter technology.
Harleysville’s real-time system employs licensed technology that the company modified using internal and consulting resources. Agents can go online, submit relevant information and get a quote in minutes, elminating the need for paper faxes or policy documents and allowing agents more time to create proposals for their prospects.
The idea is to allow agents to serve themselves, so their interactions with the carrier, in this case Harleysville, can focus on weightier matters like risk or competition. All of Harleysville’s new policies are built in the new system and the company is “pretty far along” on converting its own policies to the web-based system.
“I’m extremely proud of our team,” says Tripathi. “We’re very fortunate to have one of the strongest technology teams that is also very closely aligned with the needs of our business.”
Source: Akhil Tripathi, Harleysville Insurance
Writer: Joe Petrucci