Oracle today announced the availability of Oracle Insurance Insbridge Rating and Underwriting 4.1, an adaptive enterprise solution for rating and underwriting rules management. The latest release includes new features that are designed to support greater flexibility, adaptability and productivity for insurers, agents and underwriters, including the ability to conduct mobile rating.
The highlight of this new release is its offline feature functionality, which enables users to conduct rating and quoting in the field. By loading the latest Oracle Insurance Insbridge rating content to their laptop or mobile device, agents and underwriters can provide more rapid and responsive service to customers in their home or office environment.
This new functionality addresses customer service needs of high-touch lines of business, such as healthcare insurance, where policies are more often sold by agents meeting face-to-face with clients in their homes.
The solution, which includes expanded rate version name and foldering capabilities that promote usability, efficiency and accuracy, also offers new Web 2.0 features that extend user communication and collaboration by allowing users to provide input on system functionality to Oracle developers and share ideas on new ways to use Oracle Insurance Insbridge. For example, RSS homepage snaps connect directly to Oracle Insurance Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube and Oracle Mix user forums, facilitating interaction and collaboration with Oracle and other users.
"Much of the value of modern rating engines is the fact that they provide a user-friendly means to create, test and manage the pricing rules,” said Kimberly Harris-Ferrante, VP and distinguished analyst at Gartner. “This empowers the business analyst, product manager and actuary to focus on improving pricing through rule manipulation, insight into the impact of rule changes, and validating prices against existing policies. Due to the nature of how rating engines sit within the core systems landscape, interoperability and ease of integration are critical."
Oracle has been on a steady acquisition path in the insurance technology space, first acquiring AdminServer, a provider of policy administration software systems in May 2008. In June 2008 Oracle acquired Skywire Software's application software business, which included Insbridge rating and underwriting products (Skywire acquired Insbridge in 2005) as well as document management solutions.
