AIG specialty auto's "specialty connection": New business application and billing process center

Rough Notes, Apr 1997 by Jean H Melvin

Implementation time is relatively rapid. AgencyLink was installed on the AT&T network in two days. Trinity Universal Insurance Company was the first company installed. It was two months from the start of the first study to the first agent download-a record time.

In developing AgencyLink, we designed a program that has multiple uses. We have never sold it to a company yet that didn't find two or three internal uses before they had finished implementing upload and download. Carriers can use it to move data from a legacy system to a client-server environment. And in this era of company takeovers and mergers, some insurers are using it to convert files from companies they have acquired. The second largest insurance company in the country is using it to upload assigned risk from New York.

The en

hanced version's new name, TransFluent, more accurately reflects the broad scope of the product's applications. It can do much more than simply electronically link companies to their agents-although that is an essential function.

There is a growing appreciation of the need to be able to communicate across disparate systems. Some of that awareness stems from a changing regulatory environment where, for example, some states now require auto insurance carriers to report all cancellations and new applications to ensure that residents' insurance records are up-to-date. That is a potentially massive amount of data that must be moved to a third party as efficiently as possible.

We introduced AgencyLink just 10 months ago, and TransFluent debuted at the beginning of this year. Up to now, our business has come through referrals because we preferred to avoid the pitfalls of overcommitting. But now we are letting the rest of the industry know that there is a painless solution for the thorny problem of data translation.