Policy Administration Systems Continue to Evolve

A quick glance at the breadth of vendor offerings affords one a pretty good indication of the centrality of a modern policy administration system to an insurance organization. In addition to being broad, the policy administration market is rapidly evolving as vendors pour R&D resources into their products.

Indeed, a June report from Boston-based Celent that surveyed policy administration solutions from 34 vendors noted nearly two-thirds of them have issued a major release since 2007 that upgraded their technology platform, or broadened their functionality. Much of this work, Celent notes, focuses on providing usability and personalization to the end user as well as more tightly integrating the solutions into service-oriented architectures.

Bolivar, Mo.-based Duck Creek Technologies Inc. this week unveiled version 4.0 of its policy admin solution. The browser-based system is targeted toward property/casualty insurers including personal, specialty and commercial lines.

The company says the new release includes an enhanced user interface that incorporates new customizable dashboards, to give end-users a modern look and feel, coupled with improving workflow efficiencies. The new dashboard and task system improves the ability to process business and increases operational efficiencies, the company claims.

"It's important for Duck Creek to continue pushing boundaries and providing our clients and partners with innovation and technology of the future,” Duck Creek's CEO, Steve Hall said in a statement. “Release 4.0 delivers an efficient, fast and universal scalable technology for the P&C insurance market. It reflects our effort to accelerate R&D efforts to prepare for the nation`s economic rebound.”

Likewise, Redwood Shores, Calif.-based Oracle Corp. unveiled a major upgrade to its policy administration offering for life and annuities.

Oracle says the rules-based policy administration includes configurable user-interface design, which enables insurance carriers to rapidly deploy role-based end-user screens for a variety of products and business processes. Other visual enhancement include a drag-and-drop Rules Palette, a user-friendly editing tool that Oracle says makes applications easy to configure and administer without the need for complex coding.