COMPANY OVERVIEW
Bristol West Insurance, a Farmers Insurance® company, specializes in non-standard personal and light commercial auto coverage. While Farmers is recognized for its broad insurance offerings, Bristol West serves a unique niche within the organization, focusing on individuals and small businesses requiring flexible personal and commercial auto policies.
Although operating under the Farmers umbrella, Bristol West maintains its own operational workflows and organizational identity. The insurer also maintains a strong focus on continuous improvement, empowering employees to identify inefficiencies and lead process enhancements. These values positioned the company to adapt quickly when remote notarization became a business necessity.
CHALLENGE
Florida Statute §627.4137 requires insurers to notarize liability coverage disclosures within 30 days of request, which Bristol West previously completed in person using 50-70 page packages. Prior to COVID-19, Bristol West handled this process entirely in person. However, the sudden shift to remote work during the pandemic made this process untenable.
Although Florida’s Remote Online Notarization (RON) law took effect in January 2020, Bristol West had not yet implemented a compliant RON solution. Instead, the company relied on a temporary workaround made possible by Governor Ron DeSantis’s March 2020 executive order, which relaxed notarization requirements during the state of emergency. While this allowed Bristol West to continue its operations during the pandemic, the company recognized that it needed a permanent, fully compliant remote notarization strategy once those temporary provisions expired.
SOLUTION
Bristol West selected NotaryCam’s eClose360® platform for its compliance with Florida RON law, ease of use, and ability to handle bulk notarizations. The platform supports uploading up to 15 documents at a time, integrates with Okta for enhanced identity and access management, and requires no prebuilt templates, enabling adjusters to quickly and securely process disclosures. NotaryCam’s secure cloud-based storage also enables Bristol West to meet Florida’s 10-year record retention requirement without taxing internal infrastructure.
“The ability to do bulk notarizations is huge for us,” said Meredith Tilton, project manager at Bristol West. “Many vendors didn’t offer that capability. The size of these disclosure packages makes that a critical requirement. The platform is also incredibly easy to use, and that’s a big part of why it works so well for our team.”
RESULTS
Sustained Compliance with Florida Statutes
With NotaryCam, Bristol West is now fully aligned with Florida’s legal requirements for both notarization and insurance policy disclosures. The company complies with Florida’s RON law (§117.201–305), which governs how remote notarizations must be conducted, including requirements for identity verification, video conferencing and document storage. At the same time, it continues to fulfill the obligations outlined in Florida Statute §627.4137, which mandates notarized disclosure of policy details upon request from a claimant or their attorney. Together, these statutes form the backbone of Bristol West’s updated, legally sound notarization workflow.
“NotaryCam checked all the boxes, especially from a legal standpoint,” said Tilton. “They made it easy to align our processes with Florida’s RON requirements.”
Improved Operational Efficiency
The ability to batch-process notarizations has significantly reduced the time and effort required by Bristol West teams to complete policy disclosures. Supervisors and administrative staff now operate on a predictable, streamlined cadence, with many teams scheduling regular NotaryCam sessions once or twice a week. As a result, the signature and notarization step—once a significant bottleneck—has become routine and reliable.
“The notarization itself is now the easiest part of the process,” Tilton said. “It’s simple, efficient and doesn’t require any back-and-forth or troubleshooting.”
Scalability for Additional Use Cases
Beyond Florida disclosures, NotaryCam supports remote notarization for other instances, such as affidavits in litigation and confidential board documents. These expanded use cases demonstrate the platform’s versatility and underscore its value beyond day-to-day claims workflows. As additional states adopt or expand their RON legislation, Bristol West is considering extending the use of NotaryCam to other jurisdictions and workflows.
Foundation for Continued Digital Transformation
Although some of Bristol West’s downstream processes are still being optimized, the most time-sensitive and compliance-critical part of the process is now entirely digitized. Furthermore, as RON adoption increases nationwide, Bristol West is well-positioned to adapt.
“We didn’t want just to patch the problem. We wanted something sustainable,” Tilton said. “NotaryCam gave us exactly that.”
For Bristol West, NotaryCam wasn’t just a pandemic workaround. It became a mission-critical platform that brought structure, simplicity and compliance to a complex process. With its intuitive interface, bulk processing capabilities and expert support, NotaryCam enables Bristol West to deliver on its promise of operational excellence and customer peace of mind, even in an evolving regulatory environment.
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