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With a bearish market persisting, IT is expected to deliver miracles without the luxury of economic hardship as an excuse.

FirstBest Systems Inc., a provider of insurance software solutions for insurance carriers, has upgraded its FirstBest Front Office Suite’s underwriting workstation, agent portal and upload applications. The applications now enable account-based underwriting for multi-line insurers and mono-line insurers selling multiple policies for a single risk.

A survey of 120 U.S. P&C insurers finds them increasingly leveraging social media platforms for business purposes. Conducted by IVANS, an electronic communications services provider, the study notes that return on investment for social media initiatives can be difficult to measure and says that carriers must work with their distribution partners to ensure a cohesive strategy.

Today's high national unemployment rate is misleading and irrelevant. The insurance industry is being drained of talent and experience—a trend that's going to impact the industry and its customers for years to come—and could soon be short-staffed.

Despite the hype around new areas like mobile, social media, and cloud, the story of insurer IT budgets and projects for 2012 is one of continuity. Insurers are investing, through replacements and enhancements, in delivering the business capabilities needed to support growth, achieve competitive parity and improve operational effectiveness. But most insurers still think of IT as a self-contained area. And few have truly integrated it into operational planning in the way that companies will need to as the broad changes in information technology sweeping through the economy start to drive change in the basic assumptions of the insurance industry.

If you had to pick an industry to go paperless, insurance might seem an unlikely choice. Core processes for insurers typically are paper-intensive. What's more, as a whole, the industry has been somewhat slow to adopt new processes and technologies.

Insurers are always on the lookout for ways to spot fraud, and with good reason. The instances of fraud, and the variety of fraudulent activities, continue to rise.

To fully exploit business analytics, carriers must supplement their internal policy-level data with a variety of data points derived from external sources. To get a sense of how insurers can best harmonize exogenous data with existing business processes, Insurance Networking News checked in with Bill Madison, SVP insurance data solutions for Lexis/Nexis.

1. Risk Management/ Climate Control

When the landmark Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act passed in 2010, it was widely assumed that the following year would entail some regulatory uncertainty as the rule-making and implementation processes unfolded. For the insurance industry, the regulatory landscape in 2012 looks to be a sequel nobody wanted to see. "It's rather unfortunate that more than a year has passed since the passage of Dodd-Frank, and things are still very uncertain," says Howard Mills, director & chief advisor, Insurance Industry Group, Deloitte LLP.