Insurance

HARTFORD, Conn.--Travelers Life & Annuity today announced the availability of its Annuity Funded Life and Muni Max products on pTeraDac Corporation's WebStory, a customized Web-based presentation system that links directly from Travelers WinFlex and Travelers Life Illustration Systems. WebStory Advanced Marketing Presentation System provides text, schematics and graphics to help the producer develop and present sales strategies in a format that facilitates the client's ease of understanding.

HARTFORD, Conn.--The Hartford Financial Services Group, Inc. today announced it has completed the purchase of CNA Financial Corporation's group life and accident, and short-term and long-term disability businesses for approximately $500 million in cash. The transaction closed on December 31, 2003.

Last October, when Allstate Insurance Co. developed a plan to best assess damage and settle claims in the wake of the Southern California wildfires, the Northbrook, Ill.-based company reasoned it would be counterproductive to set up operations in brick-and-mortar offices located in the vicinity of the fire's epicenter.With the fire spreading and local residents scurrying to find shelter, Allstate established a unique operational presence to conduct business amid the blazing inferno, dispatching some of its local claims adjusters and a 270-person national catastrophe team to operate out of six mobile response units (MRU) scattered around the area.

Barring another terrorist attack on U.S. soil, or some other catastrophic event, U.S. insurance companies are cautiously optimistic about the economy in 2004. As a result, IT budgets in the industry on average are increasing slightly this year.Research from Celent, Datamonitor, Forrester and TowerGroup suggests insurers will add as much as 10% to their IT budgets this year, with an average increase between 2.5% and 6.7%.

Although storage area network (SAN) technology has been around for several years, it's been mainly limited to big-budget IT operations, due to cost and complexity.However, the economics of SANs have been changing, thanks to more robust management tools, as well as the fact that SANs can now be deployed without expensive fibre channel technology.

In the largest-ever civil insurance fraud case filed in the state of New York, Allstate Insurance Co., Encompass Insurance and Nationwide Mutual Insurance Co. last month filed a RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization Act) lawsuit in the Supreme Court of New York.After 21 months of investigation, Allstate filed the complaint against 74 individuals whom the Northbrook, Ill.-based carrier alleges were either principals or employees of-or otherwise involved with-a group of companies established for the sole purpose of generating hundreds of millions of dollars in fraudulent insurance claims.

Alexandria, Va.-based Agents Council for Technology (ACT) is trying to sell independent agents on a new concept: using technology to enhance the sales and marketing aspects of their businesses.In phase one of a multi-part report designed to help agents and brokers build a disciplined, sales-driven agency culture, ACT, an affiliation of the Independent Insurance Agents & Brokers of America (IIABA), revealed in November that "as the independent agency system inevitably becomes more efficient, greater efficiency should improve productivity by enhancing the manufacturing and sales processes.

Insurers are turning introspective. They lived a charmed life when healthy investment returns covered for a lack of efficiency within their operations. Now, they have shifted their focus from asset management back to insurance basics.A new survey performed by the global insurance services practice of New York City-based Deloitte notes that insurers have shifted their focus after a protracted period of low interest rates and volatility in the equity markets.

There's no question that independent agents are highly valuable participants in the insurance marketplace. But carriers that depend on independent agents are continually trying to determine what's important to them when they choose carriers.Two recent studies conducted by Celent Communications Inc. provide some insight.

Information technology in the healthcare industry should not be rocket science. That's the opinion of a former aerospace engineer, Charles C. Emery, Jr., who is senior vice president and chief information officer for Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield (BCBS) of New Jersey.

Back in early 2002, the office environment at World Insurance Co. resembled a noisy beehive with workers faxing, printing, copying, retrieving documents from warehouse storage and chatting while carrying out those tasks.

Small to mid-sized businesses are often stretched to the limit in managing their human resource responsibilities-with one of the efforts being the administration of group 401(k) retirement and investment programs.

Despite insurers' best intentions to align business strategy with IT strategy, recent studies show that more than 80% of insurance companies can improve on that alignment.That's according to Deborah Smallwood, insurance practice leader at TowerGroup Inc., a Needham, Mass.-based research and advisory firm. At press time, Smallwood was completing a study of six property/casualty carriers, and, although she couldn't release her findings, she said she gets frustrated because the alignment still isn't there-and there's so much need for improvement.

There are a number of storage area network (SAN) management tools now on the market to help automate and monitor storage management processes.At Mid-Continent Casualty Insurance Co., Tulsa, Okla., for example, the expansion of the company's SAN introduced an array of new Intel-based servers to the data center.

Experts predict that the next generation of storage area network (SAN) technology will be built on storage virtualization. IBM Corp., Armonk, N.Y., already has released storage management products that provide a software virtualization layer that manages physical storage devices.Virtualization of storage hardware resources is just one of two forms SAN virtualization is likely to take, according to John McArthur, analyst with IDC, a Framingham, Mass.-based technology research firm.

A major strategy within the property/casualty insurance industry is entering new distribution channels using the Web and other technologies. To facilitate this strategy, the underlying business functionality that supported the expansion into new distribution channels was primarily based on systems that are on average more than 25 years old-augmented with newer technologies, such as expert underwriting engines.These back-end systems are inherently front-end technology "neutral" and have successfully been front-ended by J2EE and .NET frameworks. While most of these efforts have been successful in meeting the initial goal for entering new markets, these efforts also have uncovered-and in some cases intensified-the inherent legacy problem.

Zix Corporation, a global provider of protection, management, and delivery solutions for electronic communications, announces that Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Oklahoma, the oldest and largest private health insurer in the state serving almost 770,000 Oklahomans, has signed a three-year contract for ZixCorp secure e-messaging services to help meet the privacy and security guidelines of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA).

MILWAUKEE--Fortis Health signed its first individual medical Health Savings Account (HSA) policy, believed to be the first HSA policy in the country. The policy, which was opened by an individual residing in Aurora, Ill., is the first of the estimated over 40 million HSA accounts that will be established in the next 10 years, according to congressional analysts. Beginning January 1, 2004, Fortis Health will offer comprehensive HSA products for individuals and small groups through Fortis Insurance Company and John Alden Life Insurance Company.

NEW YORK -- The AIG Mergers & Acquisitions Division, a division of the property and casualty insurance subsidiaries of American International Group, Inc. (AIG), announced the launch of its newly designed global Web site, www.AIGMergerRisks.com.

ATLANTA --Ebix, a leading international supplier of software and e-commerce solutions to the insurance industry, announced today that it has changed its name to Ebix, Inc. from ebix.com, Inc. effective immediately.