The Great Bay Insurance Group
Fast-growing P&C insurer unlocks growth, profitability, and agent satisfaction
Choosing the System was Key Ingredient to Success
The Great Bay Insurance Group (Great Bay) is a single-state insurance start-up whose success depended on having a modern, cloud-based core system to launch their business.
Great Bay selected BriteCore for its modern user interface, intuitive quoting and claims functionality, cloud-based anywhere access, and standard integrations with vital data sources coupled with flexible reporting options—all within a rapidly deployable, scalable solution. Coupled with their ambition, drive, and talent, Great Bay found achieving financial success with a modern core system was painless.
With BriteCore’s modern core platform, Great Bay optimized their efficiency and achieved impressive growth. They could now track and manage all aspects of their business, from underwriting through billing, claims, and management reporting. In addition, staff could work remotely, which enabled the company to be resilient under challenging circumstances and respond promptly when strategic shifts became necessary, such as during the COVID-19 pandemic. BriteCore’s world-class data security and modern functionality continues to provide Great Bay with peace of mind that they can navigate the unexpected without disrupting operations.
Great Bay: A Plucky Start-Up with a Passion for Excellence
Formed in 2019 by Tim Byrne and a group of experienced insurance professionals, Great Bay aims to provide high-quality property-casualty insurance products and services that customers need and appreciate. The Great Bay team and their agents are proud to be smart, hard-working neighbors who live and work in the New Jersey counties of Cape May, Atlantic, Ocean and Monmouth, alongside the customers they serve. They aspire to provide the coverage customers require, at a fair price, and with an array of options to provide tailored insurance policies and pricing—all backed up with friendly, responsive customer and claims service.
Finding a Capable Vendor with a Right-Sized Solution
Succeeding as a start-up required hitting the ground running with innovative services that differentiated them within an increasingly crowded, competitive market. They required a core system that would enable them to grow, innovate, and be profitable while maintaining excellent agent and policyholder experiences. Great Bay knew their choice of a core systems provider was critical to their success not only during the start-up phase, but also their long-term success. With ever-increasing customer expectations and new insurance products and business models on the horizon, they needed a modern P&C core system that was comprehensive, fast, flexible, reliable, efficient, and offered robust information access capabilities.
Positioning for Success with BriteCore
CEO Tim Byrne’s vision for Great Bay was to find a high-quality policy administration system (PAS) that met their needs and would help Great Bay survive the rapidly evolving and challenging business landscape for a start-up insurance enterprise, as well as open up new opportunities for growth. Given their small size, they weren’t the ideal customer for much of the core systems vendor marketplace. Many existing vendors found them too small to service. In addition, other extremely complex, high-priced systems were beyond Great Bay’s financial means.
After reviewing a wide range of core system providers, Great Bay selected BriteCore as its modern policy administration system. Great Bay recognized that BriteCore’s comprehensive, agile all-in-one system would allow them to fully leverage and pursue their company business plan. Great Bay took a major step toward their success by trusting BriteCore as its core system provider, knowing that its future success would be tied directly to this decision.
From Start-up to Success
From the moment they launched the new core system, BriteCore’s efficient digital processes and automation were foundational to Great Bay’s success. Great Bay continues to achieve high agent satisfaction with BriteCore, noting the user-friendly layout and comfortable colors that reduce eye-strain as valuable features, as well as the high level of security that Great Bay counts on from its multi-factor authentication feature.
Other major factors in Great Bay’s success included:
Quick Realization of DWP Goals
In just two years of operations, Great Bay grew their Direct Written Premium (DWP) from zero to $20M. Great Bay attributes their success to BriteCore’s flexible, easy-to-use quoting and claims functionality. In addition, the new modern core system enables great flexibility by allowing their consultants to work with the system and make changes as necessary to Great Bay’s program offerings.
Peace of Mind Against the Unexpected
Delivered via the web, BriteCore’s cloud-native core platform enables staff and agents to work remotely and easily navigate unexpected challenges. For example, Great Bay’s operations transitioned seamlessly to work-from-home when the Covid-19 pandemic shut down their physical office for four months. The new modern core platform also facilitated a simple return to standard business operations afterward.
Flexible, Intuitive Data Access and Use
With BriteCore, Great Bay was able to easily integrate with industry-standard vendors and data sources, allowing them to continue adding integrations to further improve the agent and customer experiences as new tools become available. Their ability to drill into their data, identify new market opportunities, and allow for rapid, data-driven course corrections.
A number of vendor integrations enabled diverse business processes at Great Bay to be automated directly from the BriteCore core insurance platform, including:
- MassPrinting: Manages and processes the insurance document printing from any location with an internet connection and addresses a vital component of the company’s disaster recovery plan.
- ISO: Provides Great Bay with key customer and property information essential to the quoting process.
- HazardHub: Supplies Great Bay with information necessary for risk evaluation.
- InsVista: Processes mortgagee copies of documents electronically, which provided an immediate reduction of about 50% in processing cost by eliminating the cost of mailing these documents through the mail.
Great Bay enjoyed a quick rate of return from the integration of these third-party solutions with BriteCore by improving their internal efficiency and allowing them to respond easily to changes in their business environment.
As further testament to their ongoing dedication and business success with BriteCore, Great Bay Insurance was awarded an Honorable Mention in the BriteCore Beacon Award Program for their broad-based achievements across all three award categories of process improvement, customer experience, and business growth.
