Digital Platforms

JUPITER, Fla.--Dramatic improvements in underwriting performance by the nation's property and casualty insurers led to the first underwriting gain in nearly seven years. The industry reported a $5.5 billion net underwriting gain in the first quarter of 2004, compared to the $1.1 billion loss reported during the same period a year ago, according to Weiss Ratings, Inc., the nation's leading independent provider of ratings and analyses of financial services companies, mutual funds, and stocks.

LOUISVILLE, Ky. -- Humana Inc. today announced the filing of applications for five patents in pharmacy and health metrics by its Innovation Center. All five of the patent applications are for Humana's use of innovative information technology applications to engage consumers in health benefits.

With boating season in full swing, Safeco has announced the launch of a new specialized claims unit dedicated to handling boaters' insurance claims.

Esurance has the top auto insurance Web site based the site's ability to provide quick answers to consumers questions and its easy rate-quote questionnaire, according to a new report by Change Sciences Group Inc. The report, "Online Auto Insurance Customer Acquisition: Customer Experience Benchmarks and Best Practices," ranks Web sites according to their support for the goals of first-time buyers, married couples, and senior citizens. These goals include:

BOSTON-- John Hancock has launched a new long-term care insurance (LTCI) program called Corporate Solutions for the small business market to help provide individual LTCI at the worksite in the way that best suits employers' and employees' needs.

EL SEGUNDO--Computer Sciences Corporation today announced the availability of new releases of its life insurance, annuity, property and casualty (P&C) insurance, and reinsurance software components that implement the company's enterprise integration architecture, CSC e4. By using the CSC e4 framework, clients can exploit both the potential of new technologies and the embedded value in their legacy systems.

COLUMBUS, Ohio-- Nationwide Mutual Insurance Co., one of the country's largest property and casualty insurance companies, has received more than 22,000 claims in the past week for damages from Hurricane Charley. Overall, Nationwide estimates it will receive more than 50,000 claims and losses approaching $400 million.

WESTLAKE VILLAGE, Calif.--A small but growing group of customers are turning to the Internet rather than phone calls or office visits to communicate with their auto insurance provider, according to the J.D. Power and Associates 2004 National Auto Insurance Study released today.

ING has made enhancements to its online services for employer groups. The enhanced services include online reports, online documents, online evidence of insurability and online billing for self-accounting customers.

DAYTON, Ohio-- The Maryland Automobile Insurance Fund (MAIF), created by the Maryland State Legislature to provide insurance coverage for the state's most at-risk drivers, has chosen RiskWise solutions from LexisNexis, an information solution provider, to help screen information provided by applicants and claimants in an effort to proactively identify rate evasion and claims fraud.

Exstream Software Inc. has agreed to give Blue Turtle Technologies of South Africa distribution rights to the Exstream's products in South Africa. Blue Turtle will offer Dialogue, WebVerse, AFP Studio, and future Exstream products. Blue Turtle expects to benefit by offering best-in-class document creation and personalization software and integration services to their customers.

Exigen Group, a global provider of business process software and services, has announced a strategic partnership with Latvian IT services provider, A/S DATI. The agreement will create the largest resource of IT software and services expertise in the Baltics.

Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance Co. has introduced a new Portfolio Audit and Account Review program available to agents on the company's producer web site, FieldNet. PAAR is designed to help the company's more than 8,000 financial professionals and support staff improve their productivity and meet their clients' evolving needs.

To help doctors understand the role of return-to-work in recovery, CIGNA Group Insurance introduced a new Physicians' Disability Toolkit, an informational Web site for health care providers and their office staff is designed to aid patients' treatment and recovery plans.

GREENVILLE, S.C-- RBC Insurance is providing consumers the ability to acquire life insurance in as little as 15 minutes at its Web site located at www.rbcexpressterm.com.

TripSense, an innovative usage-based auto insurance program, is being offered to 5,000 drivers in Minnesota beginning August 16 by Mayfield, Ohio-based Progressive Corp. Program participants are eligible to receive a discount of up to 25%.

INDIANAPOLIS--Consumers will be able to enjoy more options and flexibility to pay for health care expenses, gain more control over their health care dollars, reap tax benefits and plan for retirement as a result of Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield's (Anthem) introduction of its Health Savings Accounts (HSAs).

A lot has been made about insurers' attempt to comply with federal regulations, such as The USA Patriot Act and Sarbanes-Oxley, but lost often in the shuffle are the ongoing state-level regulations with which insurers must contend.

Agents may not be fully aware of how customer service is related to customer satisfaction, according to the findings of two surveys conducted recently by The Progressive Corp. The carrier polled more than 1,100 independent agents and more than 1,800 auto policy holders who bought their policies through an independent insurance agency.

NEEDHAM, Mass.-- North American insurers currently are pursuing global expansion at a pace rivaling that of European insurers' entry into US markets in the early 1990s. TowerGroup finds that more favorable economics, key demographic trends and the gradual dissolution of international barriers to entry underscore the high growth possible for U.S. insurers in key emerging markets.

In the legal profession, attorneys refer to it as the "discovery" process where a legal team embarks upon intensive fact-finding to construct its case.At Bloomington, Ill.-based State Farm Mutual Automobile Insurance Co., there's a variation of the concept that's beginning to take shape. It's all part of State Farm's attempt to optimize cross-selling opportunities within its multi-product line that spans homeowners, life, annuities and mutual funds, to name a few.

In recent years, insurance companies have spent more money on legacy system maintenance than on packaged software applications, according to industry experts.There are several factors influencing this trend, but one undoubtedly stands out: Many insurers concur that there's a lack of robust software application options to fulfill their needs.

Many insurers have indicated that reining in claims handling costs is a priority this year and beyond. After examining the root cause of inefficient claims management, insurers have concurred that the onus is on the absence of historical databases.In a customer poll conducted by Jersey City, N.J.-based Insurance Services Office Inc. (ISO), 46% of U.S. insurance organizations identified the lack of historical databases as a major cause of poor claims management.

Insurance companies are quite accustomed to living with regulations. With each state promulgating its own requirements, carriers consider investments of time and resources for state filing and reporting as a fundamental cost of doing business.But several federal laws enacted over the last few years are ratcheting up the costs and complexity of regulatory compliance for the insurance industry, which is forcing carriers to consider a broader role for technology in their compliance programs.

Many insurance companies have been chasing after the people who have a lot of money to invest and protect-high net-worth individuals. But the Principal Financial Group has taken a leap for "the little guy'-middle-class consumers who probably don't have enough life and disability insurance to protect their families."We were getting a steady chant from our advisors that we weren't doing enough to support them at that basic level-selling life insurance and disability protection," says Jerry Patterson, vice president of marketing for the life & health division of The Principal Financial Group.

The Contracts Update section includes announcements of contracts insurance information technology companies have signed with customers in recent weeks. Contract news can be faxed to Insurance Networking magazine at (312) 913-1366 or by electronic mail to Stephen.Dwyer thomsonmedia.com AFNI INSURANCE SERVICES

SEATTLE, Aug. 2--Safeco today announced it has completed the sale of its Life & Investments (L&I) operation to an investor group led by White Mountains Insurance Group, Ltd., and Berkshire Hathaway Inc. Safeco completed the sales of Safeco Trust Company in April 2004 and Talbot Financial Corporation in July 2004.

PEARL RIVER, NY--41 states are now accepting the ACORD Life Form Life Application Part 1, ACORD announced. This is a major step in a multi-year initiative and is supported by numerous life insurance companies and associations, including NAILBA and NAVA.

Independent insurance distributors in seven western states now can get accurate Safeco auto and home insurance quotes without leaving their EZLynx Web portal at www.ezlynx.com.

ACE USA's ACE TankSafe will now offer above-ground coverage. ACE TankSafe is the Philadelphia-based insurer's Web-based underwriting facility for underground storage tanks. It enables contracted brokers to conduct automated underwriting transactions from submission to issuance. ACE TankSafe is offered through ACE Casualty Risk's environmental underwriting unit and targets underground and above-ground storage tank insurance products, from the small tank policies to large industrial portfolios.

PORTLAND, Ore.-- Standard Insurance Company, a subsidiary of StanCorp Financial Group, Inc. has appointed Brad Nantz as vice president of Sales and Ellen Steel as vice president of Operations for the Employee Benefits Division.

Grange Insurance, Columbus, Ohio, has licensed EDR InSight, a set of solutions designed for claims professionals to facilitate the use of automotive Event Data Recorder (EDR) or "black box" data in the claims evaluation process.Grange will use EDR InSight, provided by Injury Sciences LLC, San Antonio, to identify vehicles with harvestable black box data. Grange claim representatives will use EDR InSight to schedule harvesting services from a network of mobile service providers and for analysis and interpretation of the EDR data.

BOSTON--John Hancock Life Insurance Company has quadrupled the long-term care insurance (LTCI) operations professionals who support the sale of its LTCI products from 6 staff members to 24. The expanded support enhances service for its existing LTCI channels including career agents, its national account team, managing general agents (MGAs) and banks, and allows the company to serve two new channels, brokerage general agents (BGAs) and broker-dealers.

Zurich Financial Services, a global insurance provider, has signed a seven-year agreement to outsource all application development and support services for its businesses in the U.S., the United Kingdom, Germany and Switzerland, to Computer Sciences Corp.

BOSTON--The American Insurance Association (AIA) is pushing Congress for a two-year extension of the Terrorism Risk Insurance Act (TRIA), an extension that AIA says will help avoid destabilizing the insurance market and the economy, and will enable policymakers to develop a more permanent solution for managing our nation's economic exposure to catastrophic terrorism.

WELLESLEY HILLS-- Sun Life Financial announced today that its U.S. Group Insurance Division has reorganized its distribution organization into six regions, a new structure necessitated by the rapid expansion of its division and the commitment to provide local service to brokers and customers. To lead operations in these new regions, Sun Life Financial has named four new regional vice presidents (RVPs), to serve alongside two existing RVPs. All six of the RVPs report to Drew Niziak, Vice President, Distribution.

Nationwide Financial is enabling its life agents and distributors to streamline business processes using a Web-based system from NaviSys Inc., Edison, N.J. The system enables Nationwide's distributors and agents--more than 15,000 producers--to use the Web-based tools to propose universal life, variable universal life, term and whole life products to their clients.Nationwide is upgrading its illustration system and will begin using the new system by early fall. Nationwide will also implement in 2005 another component of the NaviSys suite, a Web-based electronic application that uses reflexive questioning to capture the information required for underwriting and policy issue. The application automatically accepts data from the illustration system, so representatives will need to enter customer data only once.

Cyber Security Industry Alliance (CSIA), a Washington, D.C.-based CEO public policy and advocacy group composed of security software, hardware and service vendors to address key cyber security issues, has released its recommendations for the development of a secure electronic health care system.These recommendations are designed to support the nation's first strategic framework report on a 10-year initiative to develop electronic health records and other uses of health information technology, which was announced today by Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Tommy G. Thompson and David J. Brailer, M.D., Ph. D., the National Health Information Technology Coordinator.

Safeco today announced strong second-quarter results, reflecting the company's solid underwriting and the competitive strength of its automated sales platform. In addition, weather-related catastrophe losses were relatively light for the second quarter. The company posted net income of $247.5 million -- or $1.77 per diluted share. This represents an increase over second-quarter 2003 net income, which was $111.9 million--or $0.81 per diluted share.

A recent poll of more than 3,000 independent agents reveals that the overall ease of doing business is a critically important factor in choosing a carrier with which to place business. The survey, conducted by Deep Customer Connections, Inc. also revealed a widening gap between agents' expectations and carriers' performance. "The gap between expectations and performance tripled on five of the 10 factors of ease of doing business," noted Paul Croke, a founding partner for the Scituate, Mass.-based consulting firm. That occurred despite the fact that the insurance industry as a whole improved fractionally on all 10 ease of doing business factors. The Web survey was sent to over 40,000 independent insurance agencies and brokerages nationwide. There were nearly 3,200 responses with more than 100 different carriers being rated. The 10 ease of doing business factors identified by Deep Customer Connections are:

New York--Fitch Ratings has revised its Rating Outlook for the U.S. commercial lines insurance sector to Stable from Negative. Fitch had maintained a Negative Rating Outlook on the sector since September 2000.

WebMD Corp., Elmwood Park, N.J., has released a white paper on the implementation of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) that concludes the law's administrative simplification provisions are increasing in complexity and costs for healthcare providers and payers across the country.The White Paper, which is the result of WebMD's analysis of HIPAA implementation nationwide, identifies concrete steps that the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services can take to steer the implementation back on course, through what the company calls a "rational roll- out plan."

Allstate Insurance Co., Northbrook, Ill., filed a half-million dollar lawsuit against a Philadelphia chiropractic clinic, All-Care Chiropractic, alleging fraudulent billing practices for insurance claims involving patients with personal injury lawsuits.The suit alleges that All-Care owners and operators Richard Walinsky, D.C. and Eileen Nelson Means, D.C. fraudulently billed Allstate for treatments that were never performed, over billed for services that were performed and used improperly licensed and unsupervised personnel for in-home patient visits.

Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield and Accenture are testing digital pen technology designed to help healthcare professionals capture and send medical claim information digitally. The solution, which is designed to complement physicians' hand-written claims process, was introduced in a two-phase pilot with Anthem plans in Indiana and Kentucky.In the first phase, health care professionals are using the pen to file claims electronically in conjunction with a desktop computer. Claims are written on specially designed digital paper forms that enable electronic data capture. The data is then uploaded electronically via a desktop computer to Anthem.

JUPITER, Fla.-- Property and casualty insurers more than doubled their profits during 2003, earning $32.3 billion compared to the $13.5 billion reported in 2002, according to Weiss Ratings, Inc., the nation's leading independent provider of ratings and analyses of financial services companies, mutual funds, and stocks.

As carriers "turn off" paper documentation and replace it with electronic information, agents and brokers are confronted with a new set of workflow challenges that can set back agency efficiency significantly unless carriers take specific steps with regard to the electronic information they provide to their sales forces.This is a conclusion of phase two of a report published by the Agents Council for Technology, a partnership of independent agents, companies and technology vendors, user groups and associations dedicated to enhancing the use of technology.

WHITE PLAINS, N.Y.--Cybersettle, the world's number one online settlement company, has been selected by CNA, the fourth largest U.S. commercial insurer, as its online settlement partner to assist with the quick resolution of commercial insurance claims.

SAN FRANCISCO--California State Compensation Insurance Fund's anti-fraud program has enabled statewide district attorneys to win more than $5 million in restitution orders. The restitution judgments are a direct result of 155 premium fraud convictions during the last six years.

HARTFORD, Conn.-- The Hartford Financial Services Group along with Ibbotson Associates, recently surveyed investors and found that eight out of 10 investors indicated that they are practicing asset allocation. However, when asked to describe what they believe asset allocation is, the majority describe simple "diversification" of assets rather than true asset allocation.

UnumProvident is now providing toll-free access for brokers to connect directly with individual disability income protection underwriters."We’re encouraging this dialogue so brokers can better understand the ‘whys’ of underwriting, and so we can better understand the individual customer," says Steve Joseph, vice president of individual disability underwriting at the Chattanooga, Tenn.-based insurance company.

NEEDHAM, MA--Until recently, regulatory compliance has been a relatively straightforward issue for U.S. insurance companies. Long deemed a service for the "public good," the insurance industry has been regulated by various entities for over 100 years - making compliance as commonplace as breathing for most insurers.

OMAHA, Neb., and HARRISBURG, Pa.-- Two leaders in the employee benefits arena -- Mutual of Omaha and United Concordia Companies, Inc. -- today announced a new line of dental insurance plans for employers of all sizes.