By Jim Rogers
Multifactor authentication (MFA) is going to happen in the insurance industry. The question is if it will be easy or painful for carriers and their agency partners. The good news is, with a little planning and measuring, carriers can avoid pitfalls and iron out potholes, making the journey to better security quite smooth.
Key performance indicators are central to MFA implementation success. Before The Hartford rolled out MFA, we developed success criteria, such as the ideal number of logins done with MFA and the acceptable number of help desk calls. Our first step, which is absolutely crucial for all carriers, was to create a change management board with a lead who owned the enterprise-wide project.
The board had representatives from every department across our organization, and those reps were responsible for two primary things: filtering information up to the board from underwriters and others who were interfacing most directly with agents and CSRs, etc., and flowing information down to those same people about the progress of implementing MFA. The latter consisted partly of metrics—our key performance indicators—which were provided via a slide each week that showed how we were doing.
A typical slide would depict graphically (and digestibly) how many users we brought on that week, how many help desk calls were received about MFA, how many devices were logging in, how many “forgot ID/password” requests came in, and if logins by sector/business line were stable or outside the expected window either up or down, to name a few of the metrics we applied.
With these key performance indicators, our change management team was able to identify if there were any pockets of problems that could affect agency access to our systems and to reach out and immediately offer aid.
Note that getting that baseline measurement is important. That doesn’t happen over a two-week period. You have to take these metrics seriously and establish norms over a period of months since there are holidays and other cyclical issues that can affect each metric.
Patience and preparation pay off
At The Hartford, we took a phased approach to ease into MFA implementation with our agency partners.
