American Safety Insurance: Accenture Duck Creek Software

Bermuda-based American Safety Insurance has been providing insurance and reinsurance solutions in the specialty insurance market since 1986.

With more than 20 domestic operating subsidiaries and a network of approximately 250 independent insurance agents, brokers, managing general agents, program managers, and reinsurance intermediaries, American Safety offers specialty insurance products and solutions to small and medium-sized businesses across all 50 states and the District of Columbia.

Having acquired a number of carriers, American Safety inherited 19 different technology platforms. This collection of technology resulted in high maintenance costs and product development timelines in excess of 16 months.

The company turned to Accenture Duck Creek to implement a common platform that could be used across the enterprise. In 2011, the new quoting, rating, binding and policy administration for two lines of business were migrated to the system.

The results have been positive. Rates and factors can now be updated in three weeks instead of three months and the submission clearance process has been reduced from three days to less than three minutes.

American Safety inherited a number of disparate legacy technology systems through its numerous acquisitions. The insurer was managing 19 technology systems, along with multiple interfaces, and a portion of rating tasks were handled manually in Excel spreadsheets.

The diversity of systems hindered the company’s operational efficiency and slowed the company’s quoting process. Presenting timely business quotes was unnecessarily difficult and implementation of new products required approximately 16 months. Likewise, product changes demanded an average of 50 days due to the complexity of the algorithms, with a backlog of 500 change requests.

The burden of these legacy systems also commanded excessive maintenance and support costs, in both time and money. American Safety decided to upgrade to a single quoting, rating and policy administration system that could streamline information processing across all its corporate entities and improve quoting time.

American Safety selected the Accenture Duck Creek rating and policy administration solution to address its technological challenges. Julia Davis, chief information officer of American Safety, explained the company’s decision: “The complexity of our products made it imperative for us to have a robust product configuration tool. We went through a rigorous vendor selection process and felt that the Accenture Duck Creek software suite had the right mix of functionality and technological capability.”

American Safety’s conversion from its legacy systems to Accenture Duck Creek software is structured in phases by product line. Accenture Duck Creek provides staff augmentation for the implementation team, which is led by Syntel. The initial migration, which was completed in 2011, consolidated the quoting, rating, binding and policy administration for two lines of business onto the Accenture Duck Creek system.

Significant improvements to American Safety’s operational efficiency became apparent after the initial Accenture Duck Creek software implementation phase:

• Time requirements for updating rates and factors shortened from three months to three weeks.

• Request backlogs were reduced from 500 to 120.

• New client onboarding process decreased to between five and nine months.

A reduction in manual processes has also reduced submission clearance processing time from up to three days to less than three minutes. Accenture Duck Creek Policy Administration and Rating has enabled faster speed-to-market for new products and acquisition integration of new lines of business within four months. The system is also providing accurate capture of pricing data for actuarial analysis.

With Accenture Duck Creek Policy Administration and Rating, American Safety is equipped to quickly introduce or modify its complex products and better serve its customers and distributors. Upon completion of the entire project, Accenture Duck Creek software will enable American Safety to rate and process all of its business on a single, unified platform and realize even greater savings.