20 years ago I was writing one of the first online endorsement engines for producers (independent insurance agents) to allow them to make endorsements on insurance policies over the internet rather than having to speak to an underwriter on the phone. We built a single web front end that was to be used by both the underwriters and the producers.

I remember showing off the role based permissions structure we had in place to allow an admin to control what sort of endorsements users could make. I quipped something like "this is so granular that we could even allow insureds to make endorsements to the policy." The response I got from the head underwriter was "we will never allow insureds to make endorsements on policies".

When was the last time you had to speak to an agent or underwriter on the phone to make changes to your insurance policy?

20 years ago was a very exciting time as many businesses were going online for the very first time. We were getting away from writing websites in C with CGI and using higher level languages like Perl, PHP, and ASP.