Who's Buying What

Royal Neighbors of America Picks StoneRiver

Royal Neighbors of America, a Rock Island, Ill.-based non-profit fraternal organization, will use Oakland, Calif.-based StoneRiver's Life Portraits ES e-Application and LifeSuite automated underwriting solutions to improve the efficiencies and speed of new business processing, the companies report. The solution is described as moving information from point A to point B without interruption, error or human intervention, eliminating cost in time and business.

StoneRiver says that prior to this project, Royal Neighbor's underwriting had been a labor-intensive process, and an automated underwriting system with a rules engine was needed to improve the underwriting and new business processes. LifeSuite enables Royal Neighbors to build rules over time.

StoneRiver says it implemented the LPES e-Application module to match Royal Neighbors' applications, which ensures a high level of agent adoption, speeds application data gathering and submission, and delivers In Good Order applications via ACORD Data Standards.

 

Everest National to Use ClaimCenter

New York-based Everest National Insurance Co. will use Guidewire ClaimCenter as its claims management solution for its commercial lines' claims, says San Mateo, Calif.-based Guidewire Software.

HCL Technologies teamed with Everest National and Guidewire Professional Services to deliver this project, with 13,000 claims converted during the course of the project, according to Guidewire.

Everest National selected ClaimCenter for its functionality and configuration ease, enabling rapid system changes by Everest National staff, which has deployed four additional post-production releases since initially going live with ClaimCenter, says Guidewire.

Guidewire also says ClaimCenter enables Everest National to be more responsive to its business users by enabling them to capture more and better data; and provide better operational reports and on-line management tools.

 

Hyundai Marine & Fire Taps SAS to Detect Fraud

Hyundai Marine & Fire Insurance Co. Ltd., Korea, will deploy a new fraud detection system that has been built with software from SAS, a Cary, N.C.-based provider of business analytics software and services.

Hyundai M&F established a strong foundation for preventing costly fraud by implementing a fraud detection system developed by SAS that not only prevents claims fraud but will help enhance customer satisfaction and improve premium payment processing, thereby protecting its most profitable customers.

Hyundai M&F's SAS fraud detection system combines business rules based on the experience and knowledge of its investigators with model rules generated from data extracted from various IT systems using SAS advanced statistical techniques. The models are applied to insurance claims, delivering results to claims investigators in real time. The system also monitors the performance of these rules, enabling the company to quickly modify existing rules or generate new ones. The predictive models enhance the process of fraud detection so Hyundai M&F can detect insurance fraud not just after it occurs, but prevent a fraudulent claim from being paid.

"With SAS providing the foundation for advanced insurance fraud management, we can maintain consistent and transparent criteria for investigation, automate the scoring system, and respond swiftly and flexibly to investigations and operations of the organization," says Cheol-woo Lee, the Hyundai M&F Claim Investigation Department team leader who oversaw the project. "In particular, this will improve the efficiency of investigation personnel who collect and analyze evidence data for suspected insurance fraud, preventing payment of unjustified claims, while protecting honest policyholders from insurance fraud."

The project has been carried out in three areas: a fraud pre-detection system to help investigators judge the possibility of fraudulent activities using statistics-based model rules and business rules; a fraud post-detection system to detect afterward the characteristics of certain groups not detected with the pre-judgment model; and a risk mart to generate data for prejudgment and post-judgment models.

 

Shelter Insurance Selects CSC Billing Systems

CSC licensed its Exceed Billing software to Shelter Mutual Insurance Co., Columbia, Mo., to boost the cost-effectiveness of its billing services to insurance customers in more than 12 Midwestern and Southern states.

Under the 11-year agreement, Shelter Insurance will implement Exceed Billing, Exceed Disbursements and Exceed Financial Integrator for all lines of business, including life insurance, and personal and commercial P&C insurance, according to CSC.

CSC says that Shelter Insurance chose Exceed Billing to replace an existing P&C legacy system, and will integrate it with multiple policy administration systems, including CSC's CyberLife software for life insurance administration.

Built on an open, service-oriented architecture, Exceed Billing is described as a scalable, automated, real-time billing system that processes all bill types and lines of business and can interface with any policy administration system regardless of platform.

 

Farmers Chooses MSB for Claims Initiative

Farmers Insurance, a Los Angeles-based personal lines P&C insurer, has chosen Marshall & Swift/Boeckh (MSB), a TPG Capital Company company, to provide cost information for estimating property claims. The implementation will commence immediately, pioneered by Farmers Specialty, Farmers' auxiliary products subsidiary, according to MSB, which adds that rollout plans include immediate deployment benefiting all of Farmers Specialty's core clients.

MSB is uniquely qualified to service Farmers because of sophisticated data collection and validation processes, says Jonathon Kost, MSB's claims SVP. "MSB serves all of the markets requiring cost information in both the public and private sectors, with tens of thousands of users in all sectors managing partial loss estimates nationwide," he says.

 

EMC Selects IVANS' Real-Time Solution

Stamford, Conn.-based IVANS Inc. announced that it is helping Des Moines, Iowa-based EMC Insurance Cos. increase market share and respond to customers faster by implementing a real-time Web service leveraging IVANS' Real-Time solution, Transformation Station. Once an agent updates his credentials via EMC's website, the data is immediately synchronized with IVANS Transformation Station, so the agent no longer has to re-enter his user ID and password in his agency management system, according to IVANS.

The product was designed to enable the agent to have an accurate and secure, single sign-on to the agency-company interface and EMC's website, and faster access to the agent's policy data, resulting in agents quoting EMC more frequently. Real-time Web services allow agents to sign on once to EMC's website and gain access to multiple applications without being prompted to log-in again.

IVANS says its systems specialists worked with EMC to launch a pilot with select agents to test the password synchronization.

"User feedback had proven that agents dislike having to enter policy data or password credentials more than once," says Rick Gass, senior VP of productivity technology of EMC. "With IVANS Transformation Station, agents have the ability to access and respond to customer information in real-time without having to re-key policy data."

 

Pacific Life Selects Insurance Technologies

Newport Beach, Calif.-based Pacific Life Insurance Co.'s Retirement Solutions Division has selected Colorado Springs, Colo.-based Insurance Technologies LLC's ForeSight to support its annuity sales and allow the provision of comprehensive annuity illustration capabilities to their distribution channels. Insurance Technologies is a provider of illustration and point-of-sale software for the financial services and brokerage industries.

Pacific Life conducted a thorough vendor software evaluation, and selected ForeSight to support its 2010-2011 annuity product expansion strategy, says Insurance Technologies. ForeSight is described as one of the most widely used point-of-sale products in the insurance marketplace, offering an intuitive user interface, comprehensive sales strategies, and the ability to illustrate a wide array of product types and riders.

Insurance Technologies says that ForeSight supports product cloning and inforce re-proposals, all on a superior technology platform, and says Pacific Life will be releasing new fixed and SPIA products on the ForeSight platform.

"This illustration platform will be fully integrated into our website and create a quality user experience for the adviser community," says Christine Tucker, VP, marketing.

 

Twelve Capital to Use AIR's Cat Modeling Systems

Twelve Capital, a Zurich-based independent investment manager focusing on insurance-related investment opportunities, has selected Boston-based AIR Worldwide's CATRADER, an application for analyzing catastrophe reinsurance and insurance-linked securities. Twelve Capital will use CATRADER and ALERT, AIR's online real-time loss estimation service, to assess and manage the risks associated with its portfolio of catastrophe bonds and other insurance-linked securities, AIR says.

"We selected CATRADER because it is the most flexible catastrophe bond analysis tool, and it provides full transparency when analyzing positions in our portfolio," says Sandro Kriesch, partner of Twelve Capital. "CATRADER also allows us to better understand the impact of potential new investments on our portfolios, which contain other catastrophe-exposed components such as traditional reinsurance contracts."

"The [reporting tools] seamlessly combines the information from the catastrophe bond offering circular with loss data from CATRADER, to provide us with a detailed snapshot of our portfolio of catastrophe bonds," says Kriesch. "We combine this information with our proprietary system, CatEye, which allows for efficient aggregation, detailed price history, and reporting of our and third party portfolios."

 

Texas Mutual Signs eBill Deal With Jopari

Texas Mutual Insurance Co., an Austin-based workers' compensation insurer, has signed a new multi-year eBill Processing agreement with Jopari Solutions, Concord, Calif.

According to Texas Mutual, eBill penetration continues to rise and related automated processing has lowered the turn-around time for payments by 33%.

"From the outset, Texas Mutual's compliance with eBill regulations has been critically important in terms of reinforcing our market leadership and establishing an operationally efficient model under the industry's first eBill regulatory framework," says Kim Haugaard, Texas Mutual VP, Network & Medical Operations.

Pursuant to renewal of the agreement, Texas Mutual and Jopari also will focus on the impact changing HIPAA standards will have on workers' compensation medical treatment, handling protected health information under new business associate conditions, and assimilation of ASC X12 version 5010 transaction sets.

Texas Mutual selected Jopari in 2007 in response to the Texas Department of Insurance implementation of workers' compensation electronic medical bill requirements.

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