Arrowhead Insurance Leverages SOA Rating Product for Use by Partners

The rating product, DecisionMaker Rating, from Honolulu, HI-based Decision Research, supports Arrowhead’s Cypress Point worker compensation programs, which Cypress Point writes in more than 30 states.

“Arrowhead is now taking DecisionMaker Rating to another level,” says Stephen Boyd, Arrowhead chief information officer, in explaining the extension of the firm’s use of the product to partners. “By leveraging this technology and SOA architecture we are able to make our programs available to other insurance partners without touching the source. Our products are being quoted as part of larger offerings by our partners and we don’t have to configure them differently for these programs unless we want to.”

DRC’s vice president of technology Stephen Korow explains that the Web services nature of the rating product simplifies the integration that would be required by Arrowhead in extending the product to partners.

“The utilization of DRC Web services has eliminated the data mapping and configuration nightmare that Arrowhead would have previously encountered when they started to grow their partnering program,” Korow says. “Having the capability to expose their rating services through the utilization of the DRC Rating Services framework enables our clients and their partners to make bundled offerings without a large upfront set-up cost and build requirement.”

Arrowhead had initially begun using DecisionMaker Rating internally because of its reliance on Excel, which was already commonly used by internal staff.

“A big DecisionMaker Rating selling point for us was that the system uses Microsoft Excel to model the rates. With our users already proficient in the use of Excel, we recognized how easy DecisionMaker Rating would be to use, and how quickly we could replicate programs for different states and different tiers,” Arrowhead’s Boyd says. “With Excel as the modeling tool, our users are able to see all the rules for algorithms and underwriting – a nice capability that we didn’t have in the past. We evaluated ‘building versus buying’ and determined that DecisionMaker Rating’s robust feature set, backed by the DRC product team, was a compelling reason to buy.”

Arrowhead uses DecisionMaker Rating for 10 personal lines of business and has also completed the integration of DecisionMaker Rating to six commercial lines of business within their online portal and policy management systems.

DecisionMaker Rating is a platform independent rating engine that provides a framework and the tools to allow insurance companies to quickly model and publish rate premiums as a callable Web service. The Excel format, that many clients are already familiar with, has helped clients bring up new products in weeks, says DRC’s vice president of product development Karen Yamamoto. “Once we have the requisite data sets and rates, our clients’ products can be in production in less than a month even when the launch involves a new line of business,” she says.