FirstBest Releases Product Suite 7.0 with Enhanced Underwriting Analytics and Integration for Property & Casualty Insurers

BEDFORD, Mass., June 8, 2015 /PRNewswire/ -- FirstBest^® Systems, Inc., provider of insurance software solutions for U.S. and global insurers, today announced the release of FirstBest Suite™ 7.0 for property & casualty insurance. The FirstBest product suite is comprised of best-in-class underwriting technology with enhanced data analytics, leading workflow capabilities, and advanced collaboration tools. Powered by customer feedback, release 7.0 of the FirstBest Suite delivers new and improved features and functionality, enabling insurers to better collaborate with producers, improve efficiency, and more accurately price risks.

With FirstBest Suite, insurers can overcome inefficient manual processes, make faster and better decisions, and avoid blind spots while evaluating risk exposures. The FirstBest product suite includes the following flexible and robust applications:

• FirstBest UMS^® – Underwriting Workstation
• FirstBest Agent^™ – Agent Portal
• FirstBest AppReader^™ – ACORD form processing and upload
• FirstBest UMS Mobile^™ – Mobile underwriting application for iPad^® users
• FirstBest Business Analyst Studio^™ – Configuration toolkit
• FirstBest Insight^™ – Integrated underwriting analytics engine

FirstBest Suite 7.0 significantly enhances the award-winning capabilities that transform the way property & casualty insurers underwrite business.

• FirstBest Insight - The newest addition to the FirstBest product suite, FirstBest Insight, allows carriers to evaluate line-of-business performance, underwriter or producer workloads, and much more – in real time. Developed in partnership with Yodil, Inc., a premier provider of insurance-based analytics software, FirstBest Insight combines industry-leading analytics capabilities with valuable data collected from within the underwriting process. Unique to FirstBest Insight analytics is the ability to compare key pricing-related metrics of a current risk to similar risks in the book of business. The solution also facilitates deep awareness about underwriting transactions, workflows, and dependencies.
• Outlook Integration - FirstBest Suite 7.0 features new tools to address specific customer needs around real-time workflow collaboration with distributors. Integrating FirstBest UMS with Microsoft^® Outlook^®, the FirstBest UMS E-Mail Upload Add-In allows underwriting users to import e-mail messages and attachments directly from their Outlook inbox into the Underwriting Workstation. Once uploaded, the e-mails are stored within each submission in the new E-Mail Collaboration Tool for easy reference. From the submission's E-Mail drawer, users can view all sent and received e-mails for the submission, and they can create and send new e-mail messages --- directly from UMS. With this new tool, carrier users can even customize system-generated e-mails before sending them.
• Line of Business Configuration - With the introduction of the Product Template Manager in the BA Studio, FirstBest UMS simplifies the ability to add new lines of business to carrier implementations. This capability speeds the time to market for new lines by quickly configuring the rating, quoting, binding, issuance, and endorsement features for each line from a single, easy-to-use interface.
• Credit Report Integration - Further expanding the information-gathering capabilities of FirstBest UMS is its new support for credit reports such as the Experian^® Credit Profile Report. This new integration capability provides carrier access to consumer credit information about the risk, as part of the underwriting workflow within the submission.
• FirstBest Integration Services - Supporting custom integration with carrier systems, release 7.0 introduces FirstBest Integration Services (FIS). Through FIS, FirstBest UMS generates XML messages for key underwriting tasks (submittal, clearance, declining a submission, marking a submission as lost, rating, binding, submitting for issuance, and generating section documents). UMS can then automatically update the relevant forms and fields with data that is returned from the carrier systems.

"With these new features, FirstBest UMS makes huge advances in helping underwriters collect the information they need from within their UMS submissions," says Paul Cummings, vice president of engineering. "The ability to access relevant documents, pictures, notes, and conversations --- all as part of the underwriting workflow, within a single underwriting environment --- vastly improves efficiency, collaboration, and turnaround time for FirstBest customers and their producers. Moreover, FirstBest Insight lets underwriters perform superior risk evaluations based on all the data collected during the underwriting process."

In addition to new capabilities, the FirstBest Suite has recently achieved noteworthy milestones regarding market adoption and customer usage. As the industry's leading underwriting workstation, FirstBest UMS supports more than 12,000 active users. In the past year alone, $5.6 billion worth of customer quotes were processed through FirstBest UMS. All components of the SaaS-based FirstBest Suite continue to run at 100% uptime across customer implementations, and FirstBest continues to enjoy 100% customer retention.

"We are excited to introduce the latest version of our product suite to the marketplace. The record levels of premium being written through our underwriting platform every day, and the increasing number of active users, validate the success that FirstBest products deliver to our customers," said John Belizaire, CEO and founder, FirstBest Systems, Inc.

"Every day I talk to our customers and hear their feedback --- not only about the success they experience with our system, but also about their payback from the industry-leading underwriting capabilities of FirstBest and their excitement for enhancements in our product roadmap," added Belizaire. "Our customers are the greatest measure of our success, and FirstBest is driven to engineer quality underwriting technology that solves important risk evaluation challenges and helps our customers grow their businesses."

About FirstBest
FirstBest^® Systems is the leading provider of insurance software solutions and services that help U.S. and global insurance companies improve underwriting profitability, scale their business, and achieve high service levels with agents and brokers. The patented and proven FirstBest Suite^™ powers the underwriting operations of leading commercial property/casualty, specialty, and workers' compensation insurers. Processing more than $22 billion in quotes and featuring a modular set of applications, the FirstBest Suite incorporates a dedicated underwriting workstation (FirstBest UMS^®), mobile underwriting (FirstBest UMS Mobile^™), an agent/broker portal (FirstBest Agent^™), data integration/upload applications (FirstBest AppReader^™), configuration tools (FirstBest Business Analyst Studio^™), and an integrated analytics engine (FirstBest Insight^™). Leading American and international insurers, such as XL Group plc, OneBeacon, Chesapeake Employers, Beacon Mutual, and ICW Group, rely on FirstBest to improve underwriting efficiencies and quality. FirstBest helps insurers institutionalize risk-assessment knowledge and best practices. With FirstBest solutions, all constituents in the underwriting process can rapidly collaborate to quote, bind, and issue business on a single, data-powered, real-time platform. To learn more, call 1-781-863-6000 or visit www.FirstBest.com.

FirstBest and FirstBest UMS are registered trademarks of FirstBest Systems, Inc. FirstBest Front Office Suite, FirstBest Suite, FirstBest Dynamic Synchronization, FirstBest UMS Mobile, FirstBest BA Studio, FirstBest Agent, FirstBest AppReader, and FirstBest Insight are trademarks of FirstBest Systems.

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SOURCE FirstBest Systems, Inc.