Insurance Policy downloadsPolicy Downloads is the process of bringing policy related information and transaction details from Insurance Carriers into agency management system in use by the agency. An insurance agency can sell policies of several different insurance carriers (like Hartford, Progressive etc). Insurance policies also undergo changes from time to time like renewals, cancellation, reinstatement, endorsements etc. These are the transactions. This list of transactions is recorded at insurance company’s end (carrier’s end). How to bring this information from each carrier and consolidate into Insurance agency’s database or CRM or agency management system? This requirement is called as Policy Downloads. How to get policies downloaded from several carriers together? One option is to contact each carrier and integrate with their system (via DIRECT FTP from carrier server to agency’s server or through API integration for example) to download policy transactions from their system. But with how many carriers this method of integration can be adopted? Can there be a single gateway to majority of the insurance carriers?

There were 5,977 insurance companies in 2016 in the United States (including territories), including P/C (2,538), life/annuities (872), health (858), fraternal (85), title (55), risk retention groups (247) and other companies (1,314), according to the National Association of Insurance Commissioners. – Source – https://www.iii.org/fact-statistic/facts-statistics-industry-overview

This is where companies like IVANS or EBix come into picture. IVANS downloads, for example, downloads policy transactions from large number of insurance carriers (550+) and EBix Team-UP from 60+. There are other players also like Brovada, NAIC, NxTech, BriteCore, Linx and Symbience. Note that downloads primarily cater to P & C insurance not to health insurance. These companies have developed software that has features for both carriers and agencies (and now for software companies developing insurance software also). Carriers can send data to agencies and also receive changes from agencies. Similar is the case for agencies. They can download/receive data from carriers and also send changes to carriers.

The way it works with IVANS is you need to get a mailbox id from IVANS for your agency. You can provide this mailbox id to each insurance carrier you work with. Your carrier will then start sending data to your IVANS mailbox by using IVANS software. You will receive data in ACORD AL3 format, which needs to be converted into XML or text format for your agency management system to absorb. How to convert AL3 to XML is another problem. For that you need a converter software. AL3 to XML converter is available from some companies including IVANS. EForms API from ACORD Solutions Group for AL3 to eLabels mapping is another option which generates XML according to ACORD elabels. This XML can then be used to extract policy information or because of adherence to ACORD eLabels, this XML makes it easy to populate ACORD forms. ACORD AL3 standard implementation is permitted only after obtaining a license from ACORD. For this one needs to contact ACORD membership services at memberservices@acord.org. As a company who develops software for insurance agencies, you need to download policies of several agencies. This is also possible now a days.

We are into software development for insurance software companies, companies developing insurance AMS and insurance agencies. Some of the emerging and popular insurance agency management systems are developed by us. Contact us today at our development email id dev@webners.com for your insurance software development. Also check https://webnersolutions.com/insurance/ to learn more about our insurance software development experience.