Making the Connection


Bruce Winterburn, vice president of industry relations for Vertafore, said agencies have to rethink their way of doing business. “If they treat this new technology like nothing more than a Yellow Page ad, then you’re not driving anyone to your business and you’re not going to get a lot of success out of it.” The following are excerpts from that interview.


What opportunity are there for agencies, carriers and MGAs to collaborate and connect to transform


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the business of insurance? It’s the technology that we have available to us today which has probably the biggest single impact. The flexibility it gives us is amazing and the onus now is on software vendors like ourselves to provide that information to agents, to producers, to CSRs in a very timely and instant fashion and ultimately to the consumers as well. Right now there is more information available to me in my left hand with a smart phone than there was ten years ago in my office. Today it’s an informational business. It’s a data business. It’s an analytical business. It literally is creat- ing a paradigm shift in the industry.


What Vertafore solutions adequately address these


BRUCE WINTERBURN Vice President of Industry Relations, Vertafore


I’ve been in this industry for 20 years and you can tell it’s an exciting time for myself and for Vertafore. I’ve often joked that I believe in this industry so much that I bought an agency. So I can look forward to the future, I think it’s a great time for us.


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needs: One of our premier management systems is now tablet capable. If you’re a producer, or agent and you’re out in the field and you have your tablet you don’t have to worry about WiFi or you don’t have to worry about a cable any longer. Reference Connect, which is our reference resource library is now mobile capable. So that all of that informa- tion, libraries of information that’s in reference connected are now available by hand. This makes for real time con- nectivity. Now, even the smallest agency can come to us for online quoting capabilities and they can get then offer their customers real-time quotes from their own site.


So what’s next for Vertafore? Vertafore has a huge suite of products. We service so many touch points throughout the insurance industry, an industry has been plagued with being unconnected over the years. Vertafore is changing that, tak- ing all of the pieces and making them work more seamlessly together, living up to our full potential. We need to focus on the user experience, making sure our User Interfaces have continuity from program to program. And that’s what we’re spending a lot of time on, that and mobility. Inclusion of infor- mation in data. The use of the technology should be inherent, almost transparent and that’s what we are doing at Vertafore.


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Best’s Review October 2012


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