One Click Away from the Best Markets: New Market Discovery Tools

Have you ever spent several hours reviewing appetite guides or visiting insurer portals to see if they have appetite for the business you are looking to write? This manual process of searching for insurer appetite is inefficient, expensive and time-consuming. It also leads agents to only go to a small group of ‘favorites’ and inadvertently miss the market for that risk, hindering them from securing new business. In fact, according to a recent IVANS survey, 72% of agents surveyed admitted that they have missed opportunities to place business due to lack of market access.

With competition stronger than ever, agencies need to leverage digital tools to improve the process of finding the right products at the right time. IVANS Markets, a free online market search tool, enables your agency to immediately identify insurer and MGA appetite for the specific risk you are searching for. By providing a simple, automated solution to connect you with insurers and MGAs, IVANS Markets expands your market opportunities and drives greater efficiency.

What’s new in IVANS Markets?

To give agencies more control and ensure their staff is working with the right partners, IVANS is releasing new capabilities that enable agencies to customize how their Appointed Markets appear in the results section of each IVANS Markets search. As your agency’s insurer relationships evolve, Appointed Markets allows you to manage your market appointments and relationships to ensure you and other users in your agency focus on the right relationships.

The latest capabilities enable you to:

• Designate your top appointed insurer partners as Preferred
• Set a custom order to rank your Appointed/Preferred insurers list
• Add personalized notes about insurers

All of these customizations are then viewable by your staff when they perform a Market Appetite search to help them make informed decisions when placing business and help your agency strengthen established insurer relationships.  

How to get started

Log in to IVANS Markets through markets.ivansinsurance.com or by selecting the IVANS Markets option that is integrated into nine agency management systems. Under the Appointed Markets tab, you can determine whether appointed insurers display for all agency users and whether users can customize their own appointed markets lists. Selecting to Manage appointments for all agency users creates an additional view in the Market Appetite search results that only displays your preferred/appointed insurers, ordered according to your defined ranking. The Allow users to customize their list option permits your IVANS Markets users to customize their appointment lists. Users’ individual selections are appended to the agency-defined list of preferred and appointed insurers in the search results.  

To request that IVANS set you up as an administrator so that you can manage appointments at the agency level as well as the user level, click the Request administrator access link.

Access to Markets, Agency-Carrier Connectivity, Agents, 2018