Carrier Rater Platform
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The Insurance Carrier Rating Industry is Changing Rapidly

Insurance Carriers of all sizes are getting bombarded with difficult requests from partners for direct access to their real time rating engine. 

  • Agencies - More and more agencies like Zebra Insurance and Coverhound provide online rates to consumers, and hope to provide full online Quote & Bind services for all carriers products as well
  • Comparative shopping sites - Sites like Compare.com and Google Compare are popping up more and more, and they also provide online rates to consumers
  • Marketplaces - There is a growth in marketplaces available to carriers like those from TransUnion or Media Alpha that require real time rate calls.
  • Comparative Raters - And, there are more and more comparative rater options for carriers to consider, with varying pricing structures, for providing real time rates to their partners.

Which of these are worth the investment of the precious technology resources of the carriers?

The LeadCloud Carrier Rater Platform is the solution.  This unique universal adapter allows carriers to address any/all of these requests, all through one simple integration.  Control is given back to the carrier, and they can choose which path is best for each and every rate call. 

 


 

 

The Details....

  The New Marketing & Sales Funnel

To state the obvious, consumers like to shop on online. And they are doing more and more shopping and comparing on line before they actually make a purchase. This is drastically increasing the role that online marketing plays in the typical sales cycle.
The Need for Rate Calls is being pushed higher into the Marketing Funnel

This trend is seen with insurance shoppers as well, and there is a rapidly growing demand for online insurance rates on websites. Consumers want to see estimated prices while shopping before they decide to speak to an agent. Therefore, the demand for rate calls to insurance carriers is moving up the marketing funnel creating much higher volumes of rate requests.
  The Problem

Current Options are Outdated 

The change in the timing of when the rate requests are required not only increases the volume of potential rate requests it also increases the technical requirements for integrating real time rates in to the online purchasing process. Current systems in the space have yet to properly address this change in the market and will likely struggle to make changes due to the high technical barrier and reduced pricing demanded by agencies and vendors, related to increased volume.

Today, there are over 20+ firms providing rating services. Of these, only a small few provide coverage for all 50 states. Interestingly enough, all of them were launched ten years ago or longer and were built around the technical and scale requirements of an individual customer being serviced by an agent in their office or over a phone call; far down the marketing and sales funnel as previously illustrated.

As we have noted earlier, the industry is changing. Consumers want to see rates online when they are shopping, often several steps before talking to an agent or engaging deeper with a carrier’s website. The increased demand is being fueled by new marketplaces like Compare.com, Google Compare, Coverhound and others coming forward monthly. The options for these groups for real time rating is limited to old technologies designed for agents; they are inaccurately priced for the high volume online rating generates; they are clunky and unable to provide flexibility to those who need it; they provide a ‘one-solution’ fits all package – that again was designed for individual agents.

The Solution: The Rater Platform

Our data integration platform is now one of the biggest and most advanced data platforms in the online marketing industry for integrating, standardizing, and decisioning data from multiple disparate sources. And Insurance Carrier Rate Calls are a perfect example of the type of real time data integration that we are the best at.

The LeadCloud Rater Platform allows an insurance carrier to connect directly to its agency and comparative shopping partners and to comparative rater platforms as well, and includes decisioning logic to route rate call traffic correctly. This allows them to choose which path is best for each relationship, and know that no additional integration work will be required once plugged into the platform.
"To use a singular and obsessed focus on data integration to create the industry’s leading Data Integration Platform, making data integration challenges disappear for everyone else."

This is our mission statement, and what we set out to do almost three years ago.


Rate Calls 1, 2, & 3 Supported—Full Quote & Bind Online Integrations  

 

The Benefits

Per quote pricing, reducing application fraud and making distribution and integration a thing of the past. 

Accurate rating and pricing are fundamental to the success of your company. However, constant shifts in market dynamics, the complexity and emergence of modern sales channels and the increasing use of third party data enrichment are putting insurers under ever-growing pressure to compete effectively. 

On top of this, many insurers still rely on comparative rater software to distribute their rates, meaning they have a large lead time to work around from state to state and product to product. And, while dealing with all these concerns, they must also find a way to curb the growing problem of application fraud, multiple integration methods and associated costs. 

The LeadCloud Rater platform addresses all of these issues and more. This standalone solution gives insurers full control of every aspect of their rates, even removing the need to distribute them – while at the same time helping them reduce application fraud and costs. Built around LeadCloud’s powerful rating engine, the Rate platform provides a host of groundbreaking functionality.  
  • Centralizes and unifies rates for auto, home, life and other product lines
  • Makes rates accessible for sales channels to retrieve, completely removing the need for the insurer to integrate and distribute them
  • Uses third party data enrichment from sources including Lexis Nexis, ADR, Transunion, ISO, ACORD and others to calculate accurate prices at point of quote
  • Can generate more than a million quotes a day
  • Supports over 350 data integrations, lead systems, agency management systems and more
  • Integrates with all websites, browsers and most insurance systems


Real-time third part data enrichment at point of sale
Third party data enrichment is changing the way risks are assessed. At point of quote, the Raterplatform can call information feeds such as Experian, Lexis Nexis, ADR, ISO, Transunion and, using the returned data to augment details given by the customer, calculates and prices the risk correctly. It does this sub-second, regardless of whether the calling application is from a broker/agency’s software system, any accepted website or an aggregator site or any other system requesting rating calls, so that all the calculations take place in real time.

No more rates distribution/integration headaches
The LeadCloud Raterplatform completely removes the need for insurers to send their rates anywhere or integrate with dozens of varying systems again. Instead the sales channels – regardless of what type of channels they are – access the rates themselves at point of sale. The Raterplatform supports all the aggregators along with broker/agency’s software systems, any accepted website or an aggregator site or any other system requesting rating calls.

Product and rates management
The LeadCloud Raterplatform is cloudbased and can integrate with nearly all third party software. Using the Raterplatform, insurers are able to update their rates
 in seconds (if using XML or other similar real time rating language) or a matter of hours if using manufactured rates. They can update their products with no downtime, so that services are not interrupted while products are being replaced or amended.

The Raterplatform includes configurable mapping for integration and communication with other systems. It also takes records of transactions and calculates throughput metrics. These statistics, plus details about errors and warnings, are accessible from the Raterplatform’s user interface and can also be posted to the insurer’s own monitoring system, if required.

The Rater platform, ultimately, allows you to become more customer centric by allowing you to better understand your consumers. This allows the insurer to design product and offers around those consumers’ needs while also creating segmentation to underwrite profitable books of business.

Revolutionizing Distribution
For broker-led insurers, changing the price of a product can mean sending out the same information to several software houses individually. And, because of the way the software houses operate, it can take up to eight weeks for that price to reach the market. With the Rating Raterplatform, insurers update their rates as and when they like and those rates will instantly become available for all their channels to access at point of sale.

 

Reducing fraud
A huge number of new policies have to be cancelled because applicants have given false information. However using the Raterplatform insurers can now identify undesirable applicants at point of sale. The same applicants may try several different channels – not realizing they are applying and re-applying to the same insurer – but with the Raterplatform they can be spotted after their first attempt. Using the Rating Raterplatform is proven to cut application fraud and associated costs.

Accurate pricing across the board
Real-time data enrichment at point of sale gives insurers peace of mind that they are providing the right price for the right risk. Using the Raterplatform enables insurers to price good risks competitively and takes in to account for rating, the bad risks. The Raterplatform gives Underwriters greater flexibility in managing rates, including the ability to change them as often as they need to, empowering them to respond in real-time to current market intelligence. 
 Scalability
The Raterplatform is highly scalable. It can scale up during peaks in business volumes. This gives the insurer greater operational agility and flexibility while keeping costs to a minimum thus allowing your and our costs to be more competitive and scalable. The Raterplatform also delivers exceptional reliability and performance. We are always making sure that we are adaptable to the marketplace and surrounding landscape.

Integration
Having integrated with over 350 data providers, aggregators, insurers, and other services, our integration process is effortless and quick. We aim to turn around initial integrations within a few weeks and additional integrations can be complete within 20 developmental hours or less. This speed is crucial when attempting to move to market quickly, allowing you to keep yourself ahead of the game; thus reducing costs and effort.

 

Other Benefits:
  • Allows businesses to continue selling through their usual channels
  • Supports any line of business including auto, home, life, health, specialty
  • Cheaper implementation of rates
  
  • Spot and rectify errors within hours instead of weeks
  • Optimize customer segmentation
  • Rely less on IT department  

Attention Insurance Carriers

Our unique and "No Agenda" approach to data integration gives you direct access to the partners you choose