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Special Report: Why Personal Lines Carriers Need to Implement Electronic Signatures Now

In recent months, the personal lines insurance market has seen more electronic signature implementations than any other industry segment. It’s easy to see why. This special report, developed by Silanis Technology, outlines what to consider from a business, legal, IT and customer perspective, when beginning to plan for an electronic signature implementation.

With little product variety, companies in this extremely competitive industry struggle to differentiate themselves and, short of dropping prices to undercut competitors, have little choice but to offer superior customer service, or develop more effective retention strategies. As several top personal lines insurers in the US have discovered in the last year, electronic signatures address both requirements. Not only do e-signatures cut in half the time needed to process insurance applications (by allowing customers to view and sign policies electronically over the Web, or at the point of sale); they reduce the risk that online applicants will abandon the process altogether during the time they normally would have to wait for paper documents to be mailed to their homes for review and signing. Research shows a majority of online insurance applicants’ final choice of carrier being motivated chiefly by price. That being the case, the ability to capture these valuable prospects online before they venture elsewhere is even more pressing.

Significant decreases in customer drop-off rates, coupled with faster return on marketing investments and transaction cost reductions of 75 percent, have driven the leading personal lines insurers to adopt electronic signatures, and are forcing the rest of this historically conservative market to catch up. A December 2006 Robert E. Nolan survey of top insurers showed that e-signatures were the top technology priority for 95 percent of respondents. Since then, a Celent survey has found 76 percent of carriers believe e-signatures are, or soon will be, “essential to remaining competitive.” Finally, based on over 100 responses from international insurance carriers, TowerGroup determined that electronic signatures were one of the top 10 IT initiatives for insurance in 2008.

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