IA App’s preferred approach to deliver a 1st-class experience for BOTH our agency partners and their clients is to do deep integrations with our agency management system (AMS) partners.
Deep integration means that we deliver to policyholders ALL of their PL & CL data. Not just top-level policy-header data, but coverages, limits, deductibles, additional interest etc.
Our integrations offer the most reliable and accurate way to deliver policy data and vehicle ID cards to policyholders – even for non-standard and E&S policies when the data for those policies is entered into an AMS.
When available, IA App writes-back to our AMS partners at either the Policy Level or Client Level so that CSR’s can quickly act upon policyholder change and certificate requests etc.
IA App also maintains their own proprietary database of nearly 1000 insurance companies so that policyholders can connect to their company for bill pay, claims etc. when necessary.
Limited Agency Management System (AMS) integrations mean policy data that gets loaded into their offering must be enhanced with carrier data.
Carrier policy data is accessed by:
1. Sanctioned carrier service Application Programming Interfaces (APIs);
2. Accessing carrier consumer web portals with a policyholder’s username & password to scrape data.
Although most carriers have quoting API’s, very few have service APIs for 3rd party vendor use.
That’s why the primary method by which data is accessed for the other app is Option #2 above.
Option #2 is questionable at best, and (from a knowledgeable tech vendor perspective) unreliable at worst because if ANYTHING changes on the carrier portal, the data is not readable until the scraping code is updated to accommodate the carrier’s changes.
It is an unreliable approach to access policy data for consumers, which leads to downstream issues for agents.