Digital Insurance Solutions - Covéa

Covéa Insurance plc has over 1 million policyholders with policies distributed through a nationwide network of around 2,500 intermediaries. They have more than 800 employees across the UK. Covéa offers a range of insurance products spanning motor, home, travel, commercial property, construction and professional indemnity insurance.

Covéa Insurance plc does not sell insurance directly to the public. Their policy is to make their products available through a UK-wide network of full-time professional insurance brokers and intermediaries.

Continuing the MMA policy of utilising available technology to make improvements in the service for their network of brokers, they approached Discover Digital to develop their new public-facing website and, most importantly, to set up a private extranet for their brokers called "Broker Online Services", now commonly referred to as "Broker Online".

Broker Online

The Broker Online Extranet was originally developed to provide insurance quotes for Covéa products, including Shops, Offices, Landlords, Residential Property Owners, Commercial Property Owners, Master Tradesman Plus, Motor Trade and Motor Trade Internal Risks.

Broker Online was extended to provide online "full cycle" facilities. In addition to incepting new policies, brokers can access current and historic policy details, make standard adjustments without referral to Covéa, and renew and cancel policies.

Close attention was paid to ensuring simple navigation of Broker Online. And it is important to help the broker to fill in forms speedily and accurately. Insurance data capture forms are set up to capture essential information first and only to reveal additional question sets when they are required. These forms use a postcode lookup web service from Postcode Anywhere, which allows brokers to enter only the postcode and property name to retrieve a full postal address automatically. Another geo-location service from Postcode Anywhere powers the "broker locator" facility on the public website.

Documents Generation

With a unique Documents Generation and Management System developed by Discover IT (now Discover Digital), brokers have online access to the full policy documentation at the point of sale.

The Documents Generation and Management System (DMS) enables document templates to be prepared using Word ML, a markup vocabulary at the heart of Microsoft Word's XML features. Word ML combined with AltSoft's XML2PDF software enables the Broker Online DMS to dynamically generate and stitch all the policy documents in PDF format.

A Document Templates Generator add-in for Word 2003 / Word 2007 / Word 2010, was developed to allow MMA to generate the full range of document templates. These templates use file name encoding to associate with specific insurance products at required stages of the "workflow". Templates are selected automatically and bound to policy data to produce the policy documents. If you have an application that requires the dynamic generation of Word or PDF documents, our Documents Generation and Management System, together with its Document Templates Generator, may be just what you need. Click here for more details.

Broker Online also allows brokers to update the Motor Insurance Database (MID) database for motor trade policies and to submit encrypted online payments.

The Broker Online site is held in a password-protected area and is not available to the general public. Broker login is controlled on an individual user basis, assigns rights and privileges at the broker level and the user level, and audits essential actions.

Implementing a digital platform such as Broker Online can present various challenges that need to be addressed to ensure its success and smooth operation. Some of the potential challenges include the following:

1. Integration with existing systems: Integrating the Broker Online platform with Covéa's enterprise back-end system via web services presented technical difficulties and required careful planning to ensure seamless integration and avoid disrupting business operations.
2. Security and privacy: The platform handles sensitive information and financial transactions, making security and privacy a top concern. Measures such as encryption, secure authentication, and regular security audits must be in place to protect sensitive information and maintain user trust.
3. Scalability: As the platform grew, it needed to scale up its infrastructure to accommodate the increased traffic and user base. This required careful planning and resources to ensure seamless scalability.
4. User adoption: A digital platform is only successful if users are willing to adopt it. The platform must be user-friendly, easy to use, and offer a seamless user experience. Broker Online will need to ensure that its user interface is intuitive and that user support is readily available to help users transition to the new platform.
5. Data management and maintenance: The platform must manage and maintain a large amount of data its users generate efficiently and effectively. This will require robust data management and maintenance processes to ensure data accuracy, reliability, and availability.

Overall, implementing Broker Online's digital platform required careful planning and attention to detail to ensure its success and meet the needs of its users.

Broker Online has provided Covéa/MMA brokers instant online quotations and confirmation of cover for their Commercial Line products.

Discover IT (now Discover Digital) continuously developed and managed the hosting of the Covéa website and Broker Online extranet for over 15 years. Broker Online integrates via a Virtual Private Network to Covéas enterprise back-end system via web services. Broker Online has over 10,000 users from 3,000 brokers.

Broker Online has always been well regarded by Covéa brokers and has been very favourably rated in industry surveys.