Insurance

Redmond, Wash. - In an effort to reduce millions of dollars of integration pain on the part of insurance customers, Microsoft Corp. is releasing a new architecture to assist insurance companies in developing service-oriented architectures (SOAs) and deploying pre-integrated software applications around core insurance business processes.The Microsoft Insurance Value Chain (IVC) Architecture v1.0, which will be demonstrated at the ACORD/LOMA Insurance Forum in Las Vegas this month and completed by late June, is an industry-standards-based approach designed to enable workflow across multiple insurance applications--on or off the Microsoft platform. The architecture is the result of newly launched integration labs, held monthly on Microsoft's Redmond, Wash., campus.

New York - The Group of North American Insurance Enterprises (GNAIE) has launched its newly redesigned Web site, http://www.insuranceaccounting.org, to serve as a central source of news, research and analysis on the development of accounting standards for insurance companies."An important part of the GNAIE mission is to communicate effectively with insurers worldwide as well as the U.S. and international accounting standards community. The new Web site is a crucial component of that communications endeavor," says Richard Carbone, chairman of GNAIE, who is CFO of Prudential Financial Inc.

Boston - AIR Worldwide Corp. issued a white paper titled, "Understanding Climatological Influences on Hurricane Activity: The AIR Near-term Catalog." The paper reviews the current state of research on climatological impacts on hurricane activity and explains the approach used to create AIR's near-term sensitivity catalog, which quantifies the influence of sea surface temperature (SST) forecasts on insured losses for the next five years."Our analyses confirmed the correlation between elevated sea-surface temperatures and overall hurricane activity in the Atlantic basin," says Karen Clark, president and CEO of AIR Worldwide Corp. "However, there is considerable uncertainty in the expected magnitude and time horizon of potentially elevated risk along the coastline and, most importantly, the impact on regional insured losses."

Chicago - UniCare has launched a newly redesigned and improved secure member Web site designed to provide members and their families more streamlined access to personalized online health and benefit information.The changes make the site easier to navigate by requiring fewer clicks in order for members to access information specific to their health care needs, according to UniCare. The site now provides members easier access to personal online health information through single sign-on log-in capabilities. In addition, if members have misplaced or forgotten their username, they can request it online without having to call customer service support.

Okemos, Mich. - The Pennsylvania Insurance Department has turned to Sircon Corp. and partner Thomson Prometric to streamline the state's resident licensing process.Pennsylvania insurance law requires that all individuals applying for an initial resident insurance producer license must be fingerprinted in order to facilitate background checks, which are performed by submitting fingerprint images to the FBI's Criminal Justice Information Services Division (CJISD) through the Pennsylvania State Police (PSP).

Denver - InsureMe, an online insurance resource for consumer and agents, has launched the InsureMe Insurance Blog, targeted at consumers with insurance-related questions.The blog, an online forum where authors post short articles and commentary, addresses top news in health, life, home and auto insurance, as well as state-specific issues and related topics facing consumers. The blog is interactive, which enables readers to post their questions and comments on each entry.

Cleveland - Members can do everything from determining deductibles to accessing claims information on the redesigned Web site of Consumers Life Insurance Co. at http://www.consumerslife.com/.Creating a Web presence that would help members better understand and use their health insurance benefits was a priority, according to Chris Hoffman, manager of Internet communications.

Hartford, Conn. - Aetna Global Benefits, the international business of Aetna, is offering a new feature for its members: payment of applicable wire transfer fees for international health care claim reimbursements. In the past, members who received their claims reimbursements through wire transfers were responsible for any transaction fees charged by their banks. AGB has the capability to issue these claims reimbursements in over 100 currencies."By covering these fees, which could be in excess of $25 (U.S.) per transaction, we feel that we significantly improve one of the ways that members currently receive claim reimbursements," says Martha Temple, head of Aetna Global Benefits (AGB). "This is part of our continued effort to provide high-quality, concierge-level services to our members around the world."

London - The majority of European insurers believe that Solvency II will improve their companies' risk and capital management functions, and half have already enacted formal programs to address the proposed European Union (EU) directive, according to results of a survey released today by Bermuda-based technology services company Accenture.

Newark, Calif. - In response to a growing insurance industry need, Risk Management Solutions (RMS) completed of a probabilistic model for assessing the risk of influenza pandemics across multiple countries.Many published studies have already illustrated the effects of various pandemic scenarios, most commonly a repeat of the 1918 influenza pandemic that had a mortality level of 0.67% in the U.S. and even more severe effects in other countries. Analysis of the virology and epidemiological science shows that more severe pandemics are possible, and probabilistic estimation of virus characteristics incorporating the recent H5N1 suggests that there is a one in five chance of a pandemic that is more severe than that experienced in 1918.

London - Guy Carpenter & Co. Inc., a global risk and reinsurance specialist and a part of the Marsh & McLennan Cos., is launching its Electronic Claims File (ECF) initiative for reinsurers in the London market after development, testing and implementation of a pilot project with select Lloyd's managing agents.As one of the largest reinsurance brokers to offer ECF, a key component of the broader London Market reform program, Guy Carpenter will be able to process and conduct many of its claims transactions in a completely paperless environment with its current trading partners.

The analysts say it's a given. More than 65% of insurance companies in a study conducted more than two years ago by Gartner Inc., a Stamford, Conn., research firm, agreed that the general trend for IT architecture is toward a "services-oriented approach."Mark Gorman, research director with TowerGroup, a Needham, Mass.-based research firm, says its current research confirms that carriers are using some form of services-oriented architecture (SOA). "Carriers are more advanced in their knowledge of SOA," he says. "They're not just analyzing it any more."

There's no question that both agents and carriers are enthusiastically embracing many of the Web services standards now available across the industry. However, we're still only in the early stages of this process, and there is much work to be done to smooth the integration and transfer of customer and policy data between agents and carriers.Some leading carriers, in fact, report their overall XML-transaction volume is still relatively low compared with other messaging modes. Leading the way in XML efforts is ACORD (Association for Cooperative Operations Research and Development, Pearl River, N.Y.). ACORD's XML specifications-covering property/casualty, life and reinsurance-are designed to help move the industry away from monolithic and proprietary systems and toward networks that enable interoperability among systems and the sharing of data between carriers, agencies, brokers and third-party services.

Like perfection, Straight-through processing (STP) is something many insurance company IT departments are striving for but may find hard to call fully conquered.

I had the pleasure recently of meeting malcom gladwell, the well-known New York author of "The Tipping Point" and his latest treatise, "Blink." Gladwell had been invited to speak to a group of insurance and banking executives on the theories contained in his new book; namely, that great decision-makers are not those who process the most information or spend the most time deliberating, but those who have perfected the art of "thin-slicing."Thin-slicing refers to the snap (in the blink of an eye) decisions we make based on the ability to filter-from an overwhelming number of variables-the very few factors that matter to the subject at hand.

You have heard, and probably have even used, the phrase: "Time is of the essence." No one knows that better than insurers answering requests from customers who want their information now. Hence, the real-time phenomenon in the industry.After discovering customer data wasn't easily accessible, executives at Sioux Falls-based South Dakota State Medical Holding Co. Inc. (Dakotacare) decided the company needed a business intelligence tool to retrieve claims data from its database of 140 million records.

Insurance Networking News recently interviewed Steven Hauck, co-founder and president of AgencyPort Insurance Services Inc., a Boston-based provider of Web-based agency portal and agency interface software for P&C companies. Hauck's experience with Web-based standards includes nine years in a variety of financial services sales and marketing management positions with The E*Trade organization, New York. Hauck has been active in the insurance industry since founding AgencyPort in 2000.INN: What are the benefits to carriers of incorporating ACORD XML standards into agency-facing Web technology?

When Brigitte Hamilton looks back on the humble beginnings of her organization's intranet, there were only six divisional areas of the site and upwards of about 500 pages.That was in 1997. Since then, Oregon's largest workers' compensation insurance company, Salem-based State Accident Insurance Fund of Oregon (SAIF), has added nearly a dozen other divisional areas to its Web site, resulting in a page count pushing 15,000.

The best analogy for insurance technology solutions may be "trying to put a square peg in a round hole." And I suppose no matter which cliché you use, the meaning is the same: making an inappropriate object or solution fit where it doesn't really belong.With a plethora of similar technology solutions invading the insurance industry, determining which one really is "next-generation," "cutting-edge" or "the perfect fit" is often virtually impossible. For instance, the confusion surrounding one of today's most useful and functional technology solutions-enterprise content management (ECM)-has put more than one insurer in a tough spot.

New York - In an effort to improve the quality, availability and performance of its Web-based Policy Express policy issuance system, Hastings Mutual Insurance, a regional insurance company serving the Midwest, has deployed AppSight Application Problem Resolution System from Identify Software. Policy Express is a vital business application that is accessed by nearly 850 Hastings agents each day as they quote and write customers' policies. Ninety percent of all new homeowners and personal automobile policies that Hastings issues are processed though Policy Express."We were initially looking for a performance management solution to improve our service levels by detecting application performance problems before they become a productivity issue for our agent community," says Bob Eshelbrenner, CIO of Hastings Mutual Insurance. "With AppSight, we can not only identify our applications' performance problems faster, we also gain the visibility to rapidly determine the root cause, leading to a much faster resolution, which is the end-game after all."