Companies and "Web Services"

[rmccallum]

Based on portions of the conversations during the "Web Services" break out session at least one person agreed with my comments about company online rating and binding. My comments were along the lines that from the MGA standpoint it would be beneficial to us if the companies would build the rating portions of their site as web services instead of requiring a human to be present in order to get a quote etc.

The most important point here is that a web service does not need to be "standard" across all companies, sure it would be nice but it is not going to happen and it should not stand in the way of companies providing us this resource. To build a separate "translator" for each of the different companies web services we decide to use would be trivial in comparison to what we have to deal with right now.

These "web services" do not need to be complicated or use any particular technology, the simple ability for an MGA to POST data to a company rating service and receive quoting information back is the goal. This will allow the MGA to leverage the company service and still retain their ability to add value to the transaction for their agents. This after all is the point of the MGA's existence.

I hope that any companies that are thnking of building a "web site" for quoting/binding will consider designing it as a service from the ground up.
This will allow programmatic use by high volume MGA's.
It should also be a trivial process to add a human interface that simply uses the service as a means to cater to those who do not wish to automate their transactions.
It seems that the small increase in cost for this design would be more than justified if even a few of their high volume MGA's utilized it.

[tmiller]

On-line rating, quoting, binding and policy issuance is a great concept except on piece has been left out.  We, as the Managing General Agent, are still required to enter most of the data into our management system whether just for invoicing or management of our business.  If there was some sort of standard and if we could import the data back into our management system it would be great.   It has in essence created duplicate work for us in a time we are trying to streamline our workflows.

[rmccallum]

If the "Web services" were used instead of an actual human interface you would not need to worry about getting the data back because you would be supplying all of the data from your system via a program that acted as the "user" i.e. the information would originate from your system. The only information you would worry about capturing would be the returned data i.e. the result of the quote/binder whatever. This information would then be added into your own systems as well.

MGA System -> Company Web Service
MGA System <- Company Web Service

The point is that the actual user only interacts with YOUR MGA System and never sees the company system. Communication with the company system is done behind the scenes. This way the user only sees ONE system.