Analytics

In part as an industry response to legislation passed this session mandating that insurers give consumers more information regarding insurance policies to help Florida residents better prepare for hurricanes, the Florida Insurance Council announced a Hurricane Central Web site (www.flains.org).

Austin , Texas - To improve its policy management business processes, Aflac is implementing a business process management (BPM) platform. The Columbus , Ga. , carrier, which insures more than 40 million people worldwide, said it plans to use TeamWorks software, from Austin, Texas-based Lombardi, to gain new insight into process performance through business activity monitoring.

Addison, Texas - Universal Conversion Technologies (UCT), an Addison, Texas provider of data analysis and conversion services, today announced that Cincinnati-based Great American Financial Resources, Inc. (GAFRI), a subsidiary of American Financial Group, completed its conversion project. The project included the conversion of 30,000 fixed annuity policies from a recent acquisition, to the PDMA LifePRO system, GAFRI's primary administration system for all lines of business. UCT provided consulting expertise for the data mapping and project management, as well as its data conversion architect conversion.

You've driven the winding road to ERP. You've navigated the bumpy journey to CRM. Now, it's time to rev up your engines for the next big technology race: the race to the newest enterprise goal: CPM.If you haven't already heard the term, it stands for corporate performance management-also known as enterprise performance management (EPM) or business performance management.

Network storage isn't an issue insurance executives spend much time thinking about. But it should be. For starters, regulatory demands, such as those spelled out in the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (SOX), are putting the onus on executives to better manage their storage systems. To audit and archive data, organizations need to hold on to more data for longer periods of time, while keeping it all readily accessible to analytical applications.Moreover, as the industry moves away from paper documents, insurers are in danger of drowning in a sea of digital data. The buildup of data is making it more cumbersome to quickly retrieve data that's relevant to key business processes. And that, experts say, is why carriers need to properly manage network storage.

A growing number of insurers are harnessing technology to improve services to customers victimized by identity theft.Some have established outreach programs that give policyholders access to third-party identity theft restoration services. One of them, Columbus, Ohio-based Nationwide Insurance Co., is providing other capabilities as well.

A national life settlement broker is taking an eBay-like approach to the secondary life insurance market, linking cash-strapped policyholders with institutional investors.In April, Life Settlement Insights drew a handful of institutional investors online to test the open-forward auction format of a new venture called LifeX, an electronic communications network that runs on a proprietary auction platform from HedgeHog Inc. Executives with Cleveland-based Life Settlement Insights claim they've created the life settlement industry's first online exchange and are considering extending the capability to other life settlement brokerages.

Carriers have been addressing Internet security ever since they realized the public network exposed them to denial of service attacks and theft of policyholder information. Firewalls, intrusion detection, encryption, virus scanning, access management-all these tools are staples in carriers' IT operations.But what about insurance agencies? Carriers exchange customer data with agencies via the Internet daily, and agents regularly access policyholder data within carrier systems.

From the highest executive to the lowest-level associate, business people in corporate America are creatures of habit-often to a fault.Take paper processing. The reliance on paper documents might represent a drag on day-to-day workflow, but to business people accustomed to traditional processing methods, paper provides a comfort zone-inefficiencies and all.

When online insurance marketplaces first appeared on the Internet horizon more than five years ago, they filled an important gap in carriers' online business strategies. At that time, most insurers had Web sites that industry experts mockingly referred to as "brochureware" to describe their informational, non-transactional qualities.Insurance marketplaces attracted the attention of consumers who were surfing the Web to comparison shop for auto, home and even life insurance. Typically frequented by young, Internet-savvy Generation Xers and baby boomers, these online insurance marketplaces provided participating carriers and independent agents with hundreds of leads from consumers who were patient enough to wade through screen after screen of questions before they received their prize: multiple quotes from brand-name insurers.