Insurance Innovation: How Zoho One is Helping Agencies Stay Ahead of the Curve

Many things can be said about the local insurance industry: one thing for sure is they take a very prominent place in our economy, move tremendous amounts of money and are brutally competitive.

Yet, this industry seems to be sadly under-equipped to scale their important work.  The constraints their technology (or lack thereof) puts on them are not trivial.  Soul-destroying redundant busy-work, error-prone processes, and the risk of having projects "fall through the cracks" are all realities of what working with a disjointed array of tools that do not speak to each other brings with it.

It does not mean that the professionals that work in the insurance industry are lazy, or ineffective, or anything of the kind.  They are just part of a system that has grown into what it is today - old habits die hard, and colossal ships take a lot of time and effort to change course, compared to say speedboats or jet-skis.  There are other old-school industries that are still entrenched in the computer systems of the 90's as well - yes, automobile industry, I'm talking to you - but save you for another article.

Some tech firms have capitalized on the massive gap that exists in this market, and have developed some "cookie cut" systems with varying levels of usefulness.

These solutions have enjoyed success in the market, but were not transformative enough to truly satiate the thirst for progress of forward-thinking brokerages.

As a growing number of insurance businesses reached the conclusion that the systems available to them felt small and restrictive, they have been reaching out to Cloud Lion more and more.

One of these businesses is AIM (Avon Insurance Management) Insurance, a family-owned business headquartered in Burlington, Ontario - with three other offices in the province. AIM's President,  Dan Avon and Vice-President,  Jay MacDonald
share a love for motorsport (super-bikes in particular) and wish to work with speed and precision crucial in the world of racing - and missing from the world of insurance brokerages.  

AIM always had a tech-forward approach and wanted to be at the top of their game.  They knew what they wanted, but could not find anyone who could deliver it.  

They wanted complex integrations, highly customized automations and sophisticated third-party data connections - with the necessary validations and fail-safe mechanisms.  

The technology they were on at the time was better than living in spreadsheets - but ultimately lacked of the power and freedom AIM needed to be effective (kinda like trying to compete in a super-bike race in a 12V PowerWheels car).

They had tried modifying the tools they had by working with external freelancers in order to execute the architecture they envisioned - after over a year of blood, sweat and tears - they reached the conclusion these guys would never get them even close to the finish line.

AIM was also working with another consultancy firm which used a cookie-cutter approach to customizing Zoho CRM.  While this is useful to some extent for certain companies in the Insurance Industry (in the short-term, at least) - they soon became frustrated from the lack of expertise with other Zoho Apps and the limitations this implies. Zoho CRM is great - but you can only go so far in isolation.  After all - Zoho exists to break silos - not create them.

In an industry packed with large, aggressive brokerages, AIM Insurance wanted to be top of their game.  As a challenger, they knew that having good service, and hard-working professionals was not enough - they needed to secure a technological edge above their competitors.

What we did:

We first built a custom integration, allowing their clients to make payments seamlessly via a custom-made algorithm.  This also enabled split payments and financing via automation. This feature was not available in any BMS (Broker Management System) at the time - which was a major factor why AIM Insurance chose to work with Cloud Lion.

We then fixed their E&O (Errors and Omission) program - which we built a custom made middleware using Zoho Creator to a major platform used in the Insurance industry - this allowed to serve 1000+ clients at the same time.

We integrated this custom middleware to their Zoho CRM and their Zoho Books, adding even more value to their overall solutions environment.

We also integrated the middleware platform with the earlier finance integration we built - brining the seamless payments flexibility to their E&O program as well.

We have also integrated Zoho with several other BMS systems currently available in the Canadian insurance market.

Truth be told - we did (and continue to do) a whole load of other cool things, but we do not want to bore the reader to tears or to give any ideas to others willing to piggy-back off our expertise ;-)

*Update: we are in the process of centralizing all customer and policy data into a single platform, where Insurers, Brokers and Advisors will benefit tremendously from the never-seen-before interconnection that will become possible.  Once the data is centralized, endless automations will be possible in the Zoho-native environment - as well as Analytics and BI.  This will usher in a capacity to scale that is completely new to the Canadian Insurance market - call us now to become part of this revolution.

 
IPFS Integration - integrating Finance.