Replacing an unsupported insurance system without stopping the business: BindHQ for Scottish American

Customer background

Scottish American invests in, actively manages and grows privately held insurance distribution businesses in the US, including managing general agents (MGAs) and brokers, from 11 offices.

It prides itself on offering some of the fastest turnaround times in the market, and has invested heavily in technology and people to achieve that. In US commercial insurance, that speed has to come with strict compliance: communications between agents, MGAs and carriers are closely monitored.

The challenge

Scottish American’s existing system for managing policy submissions was no longer well supported. That stopped the company making vital technical updates, and limited how far it could grow and change.

Its replacement had to support every compliance standard in US commercial insurance while processing policy requests as efficiently as possible. It also had to be scalable and extensible, because Scottish American planned further development to serve its customers better and to introduce new processes into the commercial insurance market.

And years of accounting and policy data had to move across accurately, without affecting day-to-day operations.

Our approach

Box UK’s analysts began by working closely with Scottish American to understand the commercial insurance industry and capture the regulations and restrictions insurance providers must follow. That consultancy phase produced the list of requirements that guided the design and build.

Extensibility was a priority from the start. The application was built to industry best practices and coding standards, so new features, tools and data sources could be integrated as Scottish American needed them.

What we built

Box UK designed and built BindHQ, a custom web application that holds all policy details in one central system. Scottish American could use it to access and manage enquiries from agents, responses from carriers, and every update and communication in between.

To handle Scottish American’s complex accounting requirements, Box UK’s developers integrated the NetSuite enterprise resource planning (ERP) system into BindHQ, giving the company stronger accounting and reporting capabilities.

That made the accounting data held in the old system part of the job, too.

Delivery

To keep the financial information accurate, all accounting data had to move from the legacy system to BindHQ: more than 17 million files, including 1.5 million existing policies.

A detailed research phase assessed the quality of the data and whether it was in the right format to move between systems. It identified several essential tasks:

• cleansing data so fields could be validated
• converting date and time information to a consistent format
• resolving encryption issues caused by the age of the existing system

Box UK worked closely with Scottish American, drawing on both teams’ knowledge, to decide how each data problem should be handled. Once every issue had been addressed, an implementation plan made sure the migration didn’t affect Scottish American’s operations.

The outcome

BindHQ gave Scottish American a high-performance system for managing its core business processes, and a stable, secure platform to build on. Removing the outdated legacy system delivered large savings on server bills, and left the company able to react quickly to changing conditions and demands.

Box UK went on to extend BindHQ, working on custom APIs to integrate with leading carriers for instant quotations, and a broker portal so agents could upload their details directly. Those features were designed to replace lengthy email-based communication with much shorter, integrated feedback loops, so Scottish American could process applications faster and write more policies.

Frequently asked questions