IVANS Insurance Solutions Debuts Market Appetite Search Engine

By David Delony
Contributing Writer

IVANS Market Appetite, a special search engine for property and casualty insurance agents and brokers, has been launched by IVANS Insurance Solutions.

"Assessing carrier risk appetite has been an inefficient manual process often hampered by information lags and outdated, inaccurate information that can diminish agents’ and carriers’ ability to effectively conduct business," Paul Warga, vice president of product management at IVANS Insurance Solutions, said. "IVANS Market Appetite overcomes this challenge and improves agent productivity by providing a streamlined search to assess carrier risk marketing at the moment of opportunity. Additionally, IVANS Market Appetite enables carriers to more effectively communicate their demand for certain commercial lines risks to increase submissions and drive premium growth."

The company formally launched Market Appetite at the IVANS Connect conference in Las Vegas. The system will become available as part of Applied Epic 2016 in the fourth quarter of 2015.

The search engine shows users a list of insurance carriers ranked literally as the company says by the market appetite at the moment. It enables insurance carriers to increase their visibility among agency partners and build stronger relationships while tailoring their business to specific risks.

IVANS intends Market Appetite to reduce time spent searching carrier websites, other search engines or contacting underwriters directly.

What is interesting here is that while Google (News - Alert) is so entrenched that almost no one would consider launching a new horizontal search engine.  However, vertical market search, particularly in large and highly specialized markets such as insurance certainly have appeal.  They can better tailor results to agent needs and hence save time as well as obviously money.  

Market Appetite is the result of IVANS’ parent company Applied Systems’ acquisition of EvoSure earlier this year.

"Changing consumer demand and competition are requiring the insurance marketplace to be more connected and automated for effective customer servicing,” Applied Systems CEO Reid French said. “The acquisition of EvoSure and the introduction of IVANS Market Appetite furthers Applied’s commitment to automating connectivity and data exchange between insurance carriers and the independent agency channel for the benefit of the entire P&C insurance lifecycle."

This is another example of how the insurance industry, which many analysts and industry insiders have said has imperiled itself as a result of being technology laggards, is transforming as more and more business processes and internal and external interactions are automated and insurance ecosystems continue to evolve.