Are Insurance Agent Portals Dead?

Technology is advancing relentlessly and new player ecosystems are emerging that are defining new channels for customer acquisition. One report from PricewaterhouseCooper has estimated that 2021 has seen the most amount of technological changes in the insurance sector than the previous few years combined. Insurance carriers are coming to terms with this new reality of open partnerships for more efficient product distribution. After all, the future of insurance will be determined by the expectations of Gen Z and Millenials. Modern customers expect services to be built into their existing buying flow. For instance, a person renting an apartment will expect renter’s insurance to be part of the leasing process.

Agent portals have long been used as a single source of truth for agents to help them perform their tasks more efficiently. But with the rise of directly published APIs (Application Programming Interfaces), not just third-party aggregator sites but related industries can now collect information from a number of insurers and provide it in a single location to customers. This has led to concerns that APIs could signal the end of agent portals. Before we delve into the impact that APIs have had on the insurance industry, let’s take a look at what insurance APIs are and how they’re used.

What does API stand for?

Application Programming Interface (APIs) is a sort of bridge that allows different platforms and software to ‘talk’ to each other. The use of APIs for insurance isn’t new but as insurance companies open up new touchpoints, APIs are becoming increasingly important. There are largely three types of APIs in an insurance carrier’s API Hub. For those unaware of the term, API Hubs or platforms are a documented and inventoried list of all APIs that an organization has developed or has integrated into its systems. It is often a web page that can be accessed by internal and external parties, based on the API type. These three types of APIs are

• Private APIs: Developed only for internal use such as sharing customer data between the different modules of the core platform.
• Public APIs: These APIs are published openly on the internet and while they remain proprietary, they can be openly accessed by developers to build advanced solutions. Insurance carriers are providing such APIs to comparison portals.
• Partner APIs: Provided only to select partners such as agents/brokers or other industries that can send business to you, such as car dealers or real estate agents.

It is these Public and Partner APIs that are moving the goalposts in both customer acquisition and engagement and leaving traditional agent portals behind. In fact, many of the MGA’s are demanding that insurance carriers provide them with published APIs to streamline their business flow by triggering all functions like producing quotes, issuing policies, adding claims, and more. They do not want the hurdles of logging into a portal but rather be able to connect to multiple parties and applications for a more automated process.

Challenges many agent portals face today

Just having a web portal isn’t going to cut it anymore, with roughly 65 percent of 35 North American carriers surveyed by the global research and tech advisory firm for financial institutions, rating their digital experiences for agents as “average” now.

Some of the key drawbacks of an agent portal as it exists today include:

• Lack of integration: Many internal insurance processes still operate in silos with little to no integration. This is where directly published API insurance sites come out the strongest. Third-party aggregators are able to provide up-to-date information to customers in an instant, pull their previous search and transaction records and offer personalized options. Insurance carriers have started building API-first platforms that can efficiently triage, classify and route different risk profiles to special pools of agents who are able to service such customers quickly, reducing time-to-quote to mere minutes.

Read the complete article on SimpleSolve: Originally published at https://www.simplesolve.com on March 18, 2022.