The certification was announced at the Nashville ACT Meeting on March 22, 2017. ACT has been supportive of ID Federation since its inception in 2014. 

Agents and carriers consistently rank password management as their number-one pain point in daily operations. SignOn Once offers agents and insurance companies a fast and secure way to connect electronically, improve agents' access to insurance products and services, and reduce support and administrative costs.  

At the ACT meeting, Vertafore's Nellie Massoni outlined a "very thorough, very intensive process" for the vendor to achieve certification through a trust framework. But it was worth it to move the industry forward, she said. "One of the most common calls our help desk gets is passwords being expired and agents having to reset things. Carriers say the same thing.

"And you have to get rid of credentials when people leave your agency. Instead of passwords, we are going to be sending secure tokens for anyone we are providing credentials for."  

"This is a breakthrough moment for the independent agency system," said Steve Aronson, president of Aronson Insurance and an ID Federation director. "It is common for small and midsize agency employees to have to remember dozens of user IDs and passwords for business partners. From a technology administration standpoint, that translates into hundreds of access credentials—for each employee—which is time consuming and resource intensive. SignOn Once eliminates all that by providing a reliable and secure platform for identity management in trusted transactions with many different insurance partners." 

Aronson added: "ID Federation is excited to name Vertafore as the first agency management system certified to offer SignOn Once, and we look forward to authenticating additional vendors soon."
 

Applied Systems Makes Progress

Doug Johnston from Applied Systems was on hand for the announcement and said Applied is in the process of signing the agreement to go through the assessment.  

Johnston noted that it was easier for vendors 20 years ago to provide an ID and password because users typically stayed in the system. "But now we're more connected," he said. "How do we do a single sign-on with a more connected world within our systems? Some people are remote, some are in the office, and more are in the cloud, where the identities too are managed in the cloud. Mobile employees are using tablets and mobile devices to get into the system. And now even consumers are getting into the system to do some functionality, so now you have third parties integrated into our secure environment. That's a pretty big stack."

Vendors can take those requirements and go to a third party that ID Federation contracts with and ensure the framework aligns with the ID Fed framework, Johnston added. "Hopefully we can say we're second" to get certified for SignOn Once.
 

Worth the Effort

"Vertafore is psyched about bringing SignOn Once to our portfolio of insurance industry technology tools," said Bruce Winterburn, Vertafore's vice president for industry relations. "This is a game-changer for both insurance agencies as well as carriers. It makes trusted transactions easier and faster, and ultimately it enhances the insurance industry's ability to serve customers' needs." 

Johnston urged agents, carriers and vendors to get involved, even though they may have to deal with some legal headwinds. "When you join ID Fed, before you do anything you have to sign a participation agreement. Lawyers will say no. You as agents need to tell your carriers you're going to do this." 

One national carrier representative commented at the ACT meeting that, in beta testing with several Vertafore users, "we've seen a drastic reduction in help-desk calls related to password resets; for one large agency, we went from 15 a day to none. We don't have calls because we don't have issues. And if an employee leaves an agency, they can't log into our company systems." 

There's no cost for carriers to use SignOn Once. They need to work with identity providers—such as Vertafore and, soon, Applied—but they do not need to go through certification themselves.
 
For more information about SignOn Once, visit www.idfederation.org.