QBE North America Selects the FirstBest Underwriting Management System for Workflow Efficiency and Growth in Specialty Lines

BEDFORD, Mass., Nov. 10, 2015 /PRNewswire/ -- FirstBest^® Systems, Inc., provider of insurance software solutions for U.S. and global insurers, today announced that QBE North America has selected the FirstBest Underwriting Management System (FirstBest UMS^®), agent portal (FirstBest Agent^™), and data integration/upload application (FirstBest AppReader^™) as the underwriting workbench for the company's Specialty Lines unit. QBE North America is a division of QBE Insurance Group Limited, a global top 20 insurance and reinsurance company.

The Specialty Lines business at QBE North America is poised for significant growth, offering a wide range of products to the markets served by the company. In pursuit of excellence in underwriting performance, the vision and approach of QBE North America is to provide its specialty lines underwriters with a single, scalable, and consistent underwriting workstation environment, regardless of the policy or rating systems being used.

"To support our expansion in an increasingly competitive specialty market, we need robust, responsive underwriting technology," said Jeff Grange, President of Specialty Lines, QBE North America. "During a thorough evaluation process, we realized that policy systems do not offer the breadth of required underwriting functionality. We selected FirstBest UMS because of the solution's scope in managing precise, data-driven underwriting," said Grange.

"FirstBest UMS is highly flexible regarding integration with diverse policy systems, rating engines, and other technologies, allowing us to quickly scale, extend, and overlay deep underwriting functionality as needed in our operations. We are looking forward to gaining significant benefits from reducing a host of manual and redundant underwriting workflows, and establishing consistency in risk evaluation, rules, authority, referrals, and precision pricing," added Grange. 

QBE's Specialty Lines unit will deploy FirstBest UMS to scale its risk assessment operations, improve the ease of doing business with QBE for agents, and standardize best practices to enforce underwriting discipline throughout the organization. The dedicated underwriting workstation solution from FirstBest will allow QBE to eliminate the inefficiencies of navigating multiple systems and sources to analyze risk data, and enhance the visibility and strategic management of multi-line accounts and books of business.

"FirstBest offers a suite of cloud-based underwriting technology to help global companies like QBE fully manage the complexities of specialty and commercial lines underwriting — by providing extensive functionality, integration, and analytic insight to negotiate today's risk evaluation landscape," said John Belizaire, CEO and Founder, FirstBest Systems. "We're proud to welcome QBE into a distinct customer community that continues to gain measureable and sustainable value from FirstBest's powerful underwriting workstation solution."

About QBE North America
QBE North America is part of QBE Insurance Group Limited, one of the largest insurers and reinsurers worldwide. QBE NA reported Gross Written Premiums in 2014 of $5.3 billion. QBE Insurance Group's 2014 results can be found at www.qbena.com. Headquartered in Sydney, Australia, QBE operates out of 38 countries around the globe, with a presence in every key insurance market. The North America division, headquartered in New York, conducts business through its property and casualty insurance subsidiaries. QBE insurance companies are rated "A" (Excellent) by A.M. Best and "A+" by Standard & Poor's.

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 Amerisafe, Atlas, Axis, Beacon Mutual, Chesapeake Employers, ICW Group, Markel, OneBeacon, PacificComp, and XL-Catlin 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 Business Analyst (BA) Studio, FirstBest Agent, FirstBest AppReader, and FirstBest Insight are trademarks of FirstBest Systems.

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SOURCE FirstBest Systems, Inc.