CSIO’s Commercial Lines Working Group Finalizes Questions for Quoting Small Business and Professional Services

(Toronto – December 7, 2020) – CSIO is pleased to announce that the Commercial Lines (CL) Working Group has finalized a standard set of questions required to underwrite and rate small business and professional services submissions.

This latest set of questions is the third small business segment to undergo review, with questions for contractors and retail completed earlier in the year. The finalization of this work represents an impressive achievement by the working group towards enabling real-time quoting directly from the broker management systems (BMS). The finalized questions cover all 80 of the Insurance Bureau of Canada’s (IBC) business and professional services industry codes, ensuring all risks are accounted for. Standardizing the questions improves the speed of information exchange and strengthens the value proposition of the broker channel.

The CSIO Commercial Lines Data Standards are mature and ready to be implemented. Once insurers and vendors program the CL data standards, commercial brokers will be able to exchange data in a simple, structured format directly from their BMS to the insurer’s system. Several vendors and insurers are working on mapping out prescribed fields and required data points: when this work is done, brokers will have the capability to receive commercial lines quotes in real-time using straight-through processing, saving brokers time by eliminating double-entry and reduced errors. With accurate and structured data, insurers’ systems can classify the risk and automate the quoting process.

“The absence of data standards can be costly,” says Dave Smiley, Chief Operating Officer of Unica Insurance Inc. “Standardizing the questions and the data collected helps support workflow efficiencies between insurers and their broker partners by improving the speed of information exchange, therefore strengthening the value proposition with our broker partners.”

“With the completion of the questions for small business and professional services, the Commercial Lines Working Group continues to demonstrate strong collaboration on advancing the implementation of CL data standards,” says Catherine Smola, President and CEO of CSIO. “Much like personal lines, data standards in commercial lines will allow brokers to gain efficiencies in servicing their customers by using real-time quoting and providing a seamless experience.”

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About Centre for Study of Insurance Operations (CSIO)

CSIO is Canada’s industry association of property and casualty insurers, service providers and over 38,000 brokers. CSIO is committed to improving the consumer’s ease of doing business within the broker channel by overseeing the development, implementation and maintenance of technology standards and solutions such as My Proof of Insurance, eDocs, and eSignatures. In addition, CSIO operates the industry-owned mail network service, CSIOnet. CSIO maintains offices in Toronto and Montreal. For more information, visit csio.com.

For further information, please contact:

Sarina Visram, MBA, CIP | Director, Member Relations & Communications
110 Yonge Street, Suite 500 | Toronto, ON M5C 1T4
(416) 360-1773 x 2300 | 1 (800) 463-2746 x 2300
svisram@csio.com | www.csio.com