Global Life & Health Portal Solutions: 2016 Vendor Spectrum

Celent has released a new report titled Global Life & Health Portal Solutions: 2016 Vendor Spectrum. The report was written by Jamie Macgregor and Karlyn Carnahan, both with Celent’s Insurance practice.

Agent portals are a relatively mature technology. Most insurers provide some sort of portal functionality to their agents because they have found that agents place business with insurers that are easy to do business with.

An agent portal is the primary point of engagement for an agent with an insurer. They typically include functionality to allow an agent to easily place and quote new business as well as service in-force business. Solutions typically include functionality such as workflow, document management, and collaboration. Insurers should include the following areas in their evaluation: specific portal functionality, configurability, technical compatibility, and customer reference interviews. Nine solutions are profiled in this vendor overview.

“Today, most portals are used as a gateway to back end applications in order to check coverage, make basic amendments, and look up pertinent information,” says Karlyn Carnahan, Research Director at Celent. “Increasingly, insurers are looking for ways to make their portals stickier through embedding tools and guides, and enabling greater mobility in order to add more value back to the agent beyond pure process efficiencies.”

“Across most geographies observed by Celent, there remains a strong preference to build portals using frameworks and tools,” says Jamie Macgregor, Senior Vice President of Celent’s insurance practice. “However, increasingly there are a number of stand-alone solutions that offer an alternative to the more common ‘build’ approach.”