XSELL RELEASES INSURANCE FRAMEWORX PLATFORMXSell LLC, a Jacksonville, Fla., provider of on-demand marketing solutions, released XSell's Insurance FrameworX, a version of its Web-based Customer Interaction Marketing platform.
Insurance FrameworX is designed to enable insurance carriers to more efficiently cross-sell various products, including third-party products, and track offers to new and existing policyholders in an enterprise-wide system.
The Customer Interaction Marketing platform leverages an institution's proprietary policyholder data, along with other consumer data, to determine what products the customer is eligible for and likely to purchase. Offers are presented through the point of contact, including call center, interactive voice response and Web, and are designed to be integrated with any existing customer service model.
ACORD RELEASES PRODUCER APPOINTMENT FORMS
ACORD released the first three of its standardized producer appointment forms. P&C carriers will send the appointment forms to producers who they seek to appoint with state departments of insurance. The forms are the result of a cooperative effort by carriers, producers and solution providers within the ACORD Producer Appointment Working Group.
ACORD says both carriers and producers will see benefits from the new forms.
Producers should no longer have to deal with the multitude of carrier-specific appointment forms, all asking for similar information in different formats and with inconsistent verbiage.
The new approved forms are: 817-Producer Appointment Form, Appointment Section; 818-Producer Appointment Form, Background Questions and 819-Additional Appointment or Termination.
CHOICEPOINT ADDS PERSONAL LINES SOLUTION OFFERING
ChoicePoint Precision Marketing, a Alpharetta, Ga.-based ChoicePoint Asset Co. company and provider of direct marketing and database solutions for the insurance and financial services industries, announced the release of ITA Advantage for personal lines insurance carriers. ITA Advantage is designed to provide insurers an advanced data and analytical "invitation to apply" marketing solution that does not rely on the use of individual credit information.
With ITA Advantage, insurers can leverage robust, multi-sourced data assets to gain greater insight into the life events that often trigger a consumer to be in the market for new, different or additional insurance coverage, according to ChoicePoint. Additionally, carriers can expand their marketable universe of qualified prospects by incorporating advanced analytics that take advantage of unique data attributes such as summarized credit and summarized auto market statistics.
DOCUMENT SCIENCES RELEASES INTERACTIVE, REAL-TIME SUITE
Carlsbad, Calif.-based Document Sciences Corp. announced the availability of xPression 3, the next generation of its suite of customer communications management solutions. With xPression 3, personalized customer communications are designed using Microsoft Word, Adobe InDesign or Adobe Dreamweaver.
xPression 3 is designed to produce customized statements, contracts, letters, e-mails, Web landing pages and marketing collaterals, from concept to production, in 50% to 75% less time using open-design tools and a powerful document generation infrastructure.
Document Sciences also reports the ability to generate interactive, real-time communications that are personalized and customized for distribution and presentation in customer-preferred formats and delivery channels, whether it is e-mail, Web and/or printed materials.
TERRORISM RISK ANALYTICS
Location intelligence provider Pitney Bowes MapInfo, North Greenbush, Conn., is aligning with Exclusive Analysis, a London-based strategic intelligence company, to provide the insurance industry with the TerrorRisk terrorism risk assessment tool. TerrorRisk combines Exclusive Analysis' terrorism forecasting expertise with Pitney Bowes MapInfo's location intelligence. Employing fact-based, location-specific metrics developed by Exclusive Analysis, the tool scores the maximum likely severity of violent risks to more than 3,700 global points of interest.
TerrorRisk's global database contains up-to-date intelligence and analysis covering a range of terrorist threats. The tool provides insurers and risk managers with the means to evaluate terrorism risk exposures worldwide on a building-by-building basis, across target types and by desired political or geographical boundaries, such as city, country or postal code. TerrorRisk is designed to be integrated into existing analytical work suites, enabling insurers to carry out terrorism exposure location analytics, portfolio risk management, risk proximity analysis and street-level terrorism risk assessment.
TerrorRisk classifies targets by name, address and target class. The data set includes locations considered by Exclusive Analysis to be the most likely terror targets.
VALIDATE COMPLIANCE WITH SOX, HIPAA AND MORE
The Security Audit Program from Janco & Assoc., Park City, Utah, contains more than 400 tasks divided into 11 areas of audit focus, which are divided into 38 separate task groupings. The audit program can be used by external or internal auditors to validate the compliance of the information technology to ISO 17799, Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA and PCI-DSS.
The program includes Microsoft Excel workbooks and an indexed PDF document that contain the following: general instructions and an audit program summary, which lists the 11 areas of audit focus, including management of corporate security, systems development and maintenance, information access control, compliance, human resource security, information security incident, communications and operations, organizational asset management objectives, physical and environmental security, security policy, and disaster recovery and business continuity.
MANAGED IT SERVICE
SBS Group, Edison, N.J., a mid-market systems integrator specializing in the deployment of business management systems, announced the release of ContinualIT, its new suite of managed IT services.
According to SBS, ContinualIT provides 24/7 monitoring, security, virus management, help desk and other networking services at affordable monthly costs. Initially, there are four levels of service covering both desktop computers and servers. ContinualIT provides companies the ability to reduce IT downtime and security issues up to 70% via proactive management and disaster prevention monitoring, the company claims. Patches, tunings, updates, firewall maintenance, e-mail filtering and non-stop monitoring are all services provided. Additionally, patch installation and maintenance is done outside business hours and on weekends to prevent business disruption, with an executive report being sent to the client each month.
FAULT-TOLERANT WEB-BASED PRESENTMENT SYSTEM
Enhanced functionality is now available for the SOLsearcher product suite from San Diego-based Solimar Systems Inc., a global provider of production printing and secure, electronic document delivery solutions. The SOLsearcher suite, which includes SOLsearcher Enterprise (SSE), provides Web presentment solutions designed to enable organizations to effectively index, store, search, retrieve and view large collections of transactional documents. Intended to complement or replace existing print processes, SOLsearcher allows users to securely access critical business documents and reports via the Web, the company says.
Solimar Systems claims the latest version of SOLsearcher is capable of serving as a repository for virtually any file type. This capability is designed to complement the transactional content support in SOLsearcher so organizations can use SOLsearcher as a single, centralized repository to manage and distribute all of their electronic files.
CONTINUOUS CODE DELIVERY
Computer Sciences Corp. (CSC) wants to make it easier for its customers to upgrade, the El Segundo, Calif., software and services provider reports. CSC rolled out its Continuous Delivery program last month, which is designed to offer incremental, small releases of code that can be immediately moved into a customer's production environment.
Using open source development techniques, the code is tested at an independent lab for quality assurance before being distributed to CSC's customer base. CSC's Exceed P&C solution and its policy administration offering POINT IN are the baseline versions upon which all future releases of the Continuous Delivery program will be based.
NEW UNDERWRITING SOFTWARE
Edison, N.J.-based MajescoMastek has released software that it says can cut in half the time it takes life insurance carriers and their producers to issue policies.
Dubbed Elixir New Business/Underwriting 4.0, the company says the software leverages the power of straight-through processing to simplify and accelerate a carrier's new business underwriting process.
Part of MajescoMastek's service-oriented architecture (SOA)-based Elixir suite designed specifically for life and annuity carriers, Elixir New Business/Underwriting 4.0's features include a configurable underwriting rules engine and the ability to handle applications for all product lines and from all production channels, from agents and brokers to advisers and broker-dealers.
Elixir New Business/Underwriting 4.0 is a Java-based thin client, Web-deployed solution that uses a flexible SOA to enable easy customization. The company says that the solution's open architecture helps it to coexist with existing legacy applications within a carrier, and that its support for ACORD XML standards enables rapid integration with third-party systems.
PORTFOLIO RISK SOFTWARE
Newark, Calif.-based Risk Management Solutions Inc., a provider of products and services for catastrophe risk management, has released a software platform that it says will enable insurance industry professionals to gain a more comprehensive view of their portfolio risk.
The RMS Reinsurance Platform is designed to help insurance, reinsurance and catastrophe management professionals reduce uncertainty in modeled losses, build a deeper understanding around regional accumulations of risk and make better-informed decisions about how to allocate their capital.
The platform, designed to manage large quantities of data, enables users to build and update their portfolios and combine their direct, facultative and treaty books of business.
The software is also fully integrated into the company's RiskLink modeling platform, which performs the core catastrophe risk analysis.
By capturing the RiskLink output and conducting a number of post-analysis functions, the Reinsurance Platform enables users to gain a complete view of their current contracts and model the impact of adding complex treaty types and conditions to a portfolio.
ACTUARIAL MODELING WITH AUDITABLE CONTROL
London-based SunGard Data Systems Inc. released iWORKS Prophet Enterprise, the new edition of its actuarial modeling system, iWORKS Prophet, which helps insurance and other financial services companies meet their reporting responsibilities and improve risk management.
Enterprise adds a separate, fully auditable production control framework to help customers improve the performance, scalability, control and auditability of their actuarial modeling. The company says it also will help customers to rationalize hardware and IT support costs while reducing actuaries' administrative data work.
The software has a client-server architecture, through which company-critical calculations can be moved away from a desktop to a secure server environment for multi-user access from anywhere in the world.
The architecture supports centralized processing for multinational companies that need to support separate business units or departments across an organization. The system uses a distributed processing environment to help increase the scalability of parallel runs, maximize hardware utilization and provide quicker, smoother and more automated results for faster and more efficient reporting.
FULL NCOA LICENSE GRANTED
Rancho Santa Margarita, Calif.-based Melissa Data Corp. has been licensed as a National Change of Address (NCOA) Full Service Provider by the United States Postal Service. Melissa Data can update third-party mailing lists and customer files against the 48-month change-of-address file containing more than 160 million change-of-address records, as opposed to the 18-month file provided to Limited Service Provider licensees.
"We are very proud to be a certified Full Service Provider," says Chris Rowe, vice president of data enhancement services at Melissa Data. "Bringing the processing of the full 48-month file in house enables us to provide the most complete NCOA product to our customers at very attractive pricing, especially large volume customers with datasets of 20 million records or more.
