Higinio Iglesias
ebroker CEO
From the report "Scorecard, fundamental tool for decision-making" of the magazine Actualidad Aseguradora Nº 3, dated 28 of March of 2016.
What are the indicators (KPI) essential for an insurance brokerage?
Starting from the base that indicators (KPIs) are metrics that are used to quantify the results of a certain action or strategy based on predetermined objectives, that is, that allow us to measure the success of our actions, it is somewhat difficult to say in a concrete way which are the indispensable ones since each area of the activity of the brokerage (financial, commercial, HR, ...) has its own and important control metrics.
Considering that the main asset of any insurance broker is their client, I dare to propose 4 KPIs that may be directly related to the client's value and its segmentation from the most elementary perspective:
- How much income does he give me (commissions / services)?
- How many insurance contracts / policies do those revenues come from?
- What is the seniority in the portfolio of those contracts.
- What is the cost for the management load of that client.
That is, 4 KPIs that combined and weighted allow me to know the value of a client because of the income it brings me, the dispersion of the contracts that generate them, the basis of the duration (stability) of the same, and all of it as opposed to the costs that the management of that client supposes me. And if you are able to know this about your client, you already know a lot about your business and can continue to ask yourself more about your company.
What are the characteristics that a scorecard program must have?
The correct thing to do is to consider the scorecard concept in the context of the Business intelligence developed by the brokerage, and in this sense the scorecard, in any of its perspectives (comprehensive –CMI-, financial –CMF-,…) has to be another resource of the ERP, a resource with flexibility in its configuration, which allow the broker to configure the thresholds and criteria of the metrics, and to be connected online to the ERP database system to produce results in real time.
What advantages does your program have (compared to others available on the market)?
- It is integrated one hundred percent in the ERP ebroker system
- It contains a large number of indicators (60) that offer more than 300 business views in different areas of the brokerage activity.
- Indicators are flexible business entities that can be configured by the user or a specialized consultant (thresholds, criteria, alarms, ...)
- The indicators produce results in real time by being directly connected to the database system, and especially the financial indicators are connected to the accounting-financial system that ebroker has integrated into the ERP context.
- In addition to the dashboards provided in the system, ebroker BI allows you to flexibly configure visual panels with indicators freely selected by the user according to their criteria and interest.
- It has a special customer segmentation module that produces an automatic and intelligent classification based on the application of the result of the combination of indicators selected and parameterized by the user.
"Ebroker implements more than 60 indicators, which offer more than 300 business views, representative of the monitoring of the brokerage in different areas (business, management, finance, quality, ...)"
What technical needs (software, hardware ...) must the brokerage meet?
It does not require any specific technical specification. As we have already indicated, our Business Intelligence system (ebroker BI) (Dashboard) is integrated into the ERP ebroker and in our new licenses it is supplied as one more module and at no additional cost. As it is integrated, the user can use it under the different forms of ebroker licensing that also include cloud computing (in the cloud) and always under web architecture.
What type of brokerage is your program geared towards? (For example, from which premium billing / brokerage adds value)
Being flexible in its configuration, it can be used at different intensities of exploitation by different profiles of brokerage companies; In addition, we provide as standard a basic configuration by default and specialized support for start-up.
What improvements and developments are you working on to improve your value offering?
We want to take to the maximum the level of independence of the broker-user in the configuration of the indicator environment, its objective values, metrics, etc., to leave the external consulting services in what is strictly necessary and useful. We are also working very soon to port the control and monitoring systems to mobility devices.
One of the criticisms made of these programs is that to justify the price they provide excessive unnecessary data for a medium-sized brokerage "they offer a scorecard of a formula 1 for people used to taking a car." What do you think?
It is not our case. Our environment is flexible in the functionality that you want to use; and also, and very important, for new ebroker licenses it is included in the ERP as standard and without additional licensing cost.
What knowledge must the manager have to interpret his scorecard? Do you offer specific training?
All the business and financial information offered by our indicators, flexible dashboards, dashboards and customer segmentation, we understand that it is perfectly understandable by an insurance broker with basic business training and experience, however, our licensing offers a wide service of initial tutorials, user help, and optional specialized consulting services on demand.