Lighthouse Underwriters is a fast-growing Annandale, Va.-based program administrator that manages insurance programs serving the eldercare, staffing services, nonprofit/association, and entertainment/conference services sectors of the economy. Its continued strong growth is challenged by heavy competition in each of its program niches, so the company knows it has to focus on continued innovation and improvement in its products, service levels and efficiency rates.

In early 2005, Lighthouse principals came across a company called ReSource Pro, which offers back office remote staffing solutions. Although initially intrigued, Lighthouse did not immediately see how this might help address the competitive and service opportunities it was looking for fulfill. But when the person handling all of Lighthouse’s billing tasks gave two-weeks notice, Chief Operations Officer, Sean Gormley decided to give the service a try.

Within two weeks, ReSource Pro, an insurance processing company headquartered in New York City with its data processing center in China mapped Lighthouse’s billing workflows, developed a manual of procedures, trained and began processing all of the billing tasks at Lighthouse, including renewals, new business and endorsements. Significantly, ReSource Pro performed all these tasks within Lighthouse’s own system, even though the processing staff were in China. ReSource Pro’s model is to provide dedicated, skilled staff to work remotely in its clients’ own systems. This approach tends to provide greater security since agencies’ data never leaves their

“One of our initial concerns was to find a company that understood our process because even though we’re within fairly specialized niche programs, there is still a great deal of difference between the way Lighthouse does things and some of our other colleagues and competitors in the marketplace,” says Sean Gormley, chief operating officer of Lighthouse. “Our billing need was met immediately and it’s really opened our eyes to a lot of other internal processes that we can ship to ReSource Pro.”

ReSource Pro now performs submission processing and policy issuance and has made a significant impact on customer service. For some programs, ReSource Pro downloads all the policies and emails them to agents and brokers with the invoices, so they are receiving an invoice for an account that they’ve just bound, whether it’s new or renewal. Policies are typically issued within 48 to 72 hours of the effective date.

In the coming year, Lighthouse plans to significantly expand its ReSource Pro staff in China. “Clearly we have seen a direct impact on our effciency and bottom line,” Gormley says. “Working with ReSource Pro allows our own staff to focus on productive-based tasks as opposed to a lot of the repetitive tasks they had been doing. Part of our regular strategic planning now is defining opportunities to utilize Resource Pro to improve service and better utilize our existing workforce.”