Mike Anselmo, CIO of Narragansett Bay Insurance Company was selected earlier this week as one of Insurance & Technology’s 2011 Elite 8 honorees. Insurance & Technology’s Elite 8 honors the leading edge technology executives in the insurance industry.
Anselmo, who became NBIC’s Chief Information Officer in 2009, was selected for his efforts in spearheading Narragansett Bay’s APEX initiative. The APEX initiative was the company’s decision to conduct an “enterprise technology transformation” which replaced the company’s legacy systems. As a result of this initiative, NBIC has gone from a $12 million dollar company writing homeowner’s insurance on the Eastern seaboard to a $114 million dollar company in 2011.
“There was proof that we could realize the company’s ambitious goals and reach even greater success in time, but there was no way we could have done it with the existing legacy systems,” explains Anselmo. “This was not just putting a new policy administration system in, we did everything – and while the company was running.”
The APEX project comprised a mixture of new core systems as well as new and existing secondary systems which created a new fully integrated architecture with a flexible and scalable web-based platform. As such, the system can operate on a light, efficient IT footprint and can be deployed effectively and efficiently within a very quick time period. What this means for agents is that it allows “maximum self-service and automated underwriting.”
As a result, NBIC has been enjoying an ever increasing reduction in the time that it requires new agencies to quote and issue policies. As Anselmo explains further, NBIC agents can now write business with a third of the time it would take on a legacy system. “Traditionally, underwriters had to fulfill every policy, but now we’re down to 20 percent, [and] we’re confident that will be down to 5 percent before long. We still have some pressing issues, as any large policy administration system implementation would in its first year and we are working hard to deliver enhanced functional updates to our agency partners.”