Embracing Texas Technology

With the advent of technology affecting nearly every aspect of daily life, new digital processes and products have also been introduced in the insurance arena. The adoption of such technology across the industry will serve to enhance customer interactions and business efficiencies for insurance carriers, agents/brokers, and service providers alike.

For those in the excess & surplus lines (E&S) industry, SLTX initiated a formal Technology Strategy in 2016 to ensure the existing legacy system would be replaced. The goal was and continues to be the creation of an enterprise-wide platform with an automated focus for agents/brokers to incorporate filing of policy information that provides an intuitive and simplistic interface, while at the same time providing real-time information for brokers to quickly assess their Texas book of business and information, in an exportable reporting manner. In designing an enterprise model, the core strength is to ensure the development has an integration and functionality across legacy functions while being equipped with current tools, language, and ease of database infrastructure. Over the last three years, other processes became evident to SLTX, as does other organizations who initiate a technology endeavor, in light of the fact that there is movement towards elimination of other dated business processes.

SLTX’s technology objectives certainly coincide with carriers, agents/brokers, third party administrators, and hosts of other industry partners in the throes of embracing technology and innovation. For example, recently, Lloyd’s of London announced their path to evolve digitally by mandating syndicates to write 70% of their risks electronically by the end of the year. Likewise, AIG will begin a three plus year program to overhaul its current infrastructure and processes, while a Japan-based insurer has set up tech hubs in Tokyo and Singapore for the purpose of developing new strategies with Insurtech startups. Obviously, these are only a few examples of what will eventually be a daily expectation across all lines of insurance.

Within its technology modernization initiative, SLTX branded its future system as Texas’ SMART system, wherein Texas will offer the broker their own personalized dashboard along with ease of graphs for better visualization.

Additionally, rather than design one interface given the varied marketplace technology platforms, SLTX is developing the appropriate application programming interfaces (API). The interfaces will be termed as a “SMART Connector.”

With a forward-thinking Board of Directors and management team, SLTX embraced an initiative plan early on for modernization and, as a result, when introduced in 2020, SMART will be the newest E&S filing platform in the nation. Notwithstanding, as future advances learned from more providers and newer Insurtech innovations evolve, this, too, will benefit the entire insurance value chain as new tools will merely serve as foundations for others.