Subject Root Tag

Redwood Shores, Calif. - Verbalizing its intent to become the number-one CRM applications company, Oracle, announced that it agreed to buy Siebel Systems Inc., San Mateo, Calif., for $10.66 per share. The offer is valued at approximately $5.85 billion, or $3.61 billion net of Siebel's cash on hand of $2.24 billion.

Springfield, Mass. - MassMutual piloted its e4 Wireless Enrollment System with several plan sponsors and participant focus groups early this year, and so far, the results have been significant.In an effort to make retirement planning less overwhelming for participants and more action-oriented, MassMutual engaged Ameranth Wireless Inc., San Diego, to develop e4, MassMutual's custom Electronic Enhanced Enrollment Experience.

Newark, Calif. - Risk Management Solutions reports that insured losses from Hurricane Katrina are estimated to be $40-$60 billion, of which $15-$25 billion are related to the Great New Orleans Flood. This estimate does not include NFIP coverage.

Malvern, Pa. - The CPCU Society has established an emergency relief fund to provide assistance to people living in areas affected by Hurricane Katrina. The Society's Board of Governors voted unanimously to create the fund after receiving numerous phone calls and e-mails from members asking how they can help hurricane victims. The Board also agreed to match contributions from its members and chapters up to $25,000. The CPCU Society will give all donations collected to the American Red Cross on behalf of its chapters in the affected areas.

Acton, Mass. - CCH Insurance Services, a part of Wolters Kluwer Corporate & Financial Services division, has launched a new micro site summarizing regulatory compliance information for insurers responding to catastrophe in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. The web site, located at www.insurance.cch.com/katrina is free of charge as a public service to insurers."Affected states are now issuing requirements and other directives specifically related to this catastrophe," says Joe Bieniek, compliance manager for CCH Insurance Services. "We want to provide insurers with a resource that will help them easily determine what is required in Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, and Mississippi so they can respond to claims quickly, avoid confusion, and maintain compliance."

Pearl River, N. Y. - IBM is contributing more than 100 business-process models, model definitions and other industry content to the Association for Cooperative Operations Research and Development (ACORD), reports the non-profit standards organization. The models come from IBM's Insurance Application Architecture (IAA), the company's insurance business and IT architecture framework. The donation will accelerate the development and adoption of business-process standards that will help address some of the global insurance industry's greatest challenges.

Kansas City, Mo. - The National Association of Insurance Commissioners (NAIC) says that while the damages from Hurricane Katrina may set record losses, the property and casualty industry maintains the adequate capital and liquidity required to withstand claims arising from one of the most devastating natural disasters in U.S. history.

Nearly a year has passed since New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer charged insurance brokerage firm Marsh & McLennan with rigging bids to maximize its commissions with insurance carriers.Allegations against Aon, AIG, ACE and other brokers and insurers followed-and within weeks, the country's largest insurance brokers-Marsh, Aon and Arthur J. Gallagher-as well as AIG and ACE had ceased the practice of accepting (or paying) contingent commissions.

The terrorist attacks that ripped through the heart of London last month provided a jarring wake-up call to American insurers.Even though the attacks, which killed 55 people and injured hundreds more, are expected to result in relatively modest liability exposure according to early estimates, insurers are taking notice.

The London bombings may have provided a wake-up call, but insurers could also be experiencing restless nights fretting over the fate of the Terrorism Risk Insurance Act (TRIA) of 1992.The future of TRIA, a safety net that has provided some protection against the financial fallout from a terrorist event, is uncertain. The law, which was enacted in November of 2002 and is in effect until December 31, 2005, provides a federal financial backstop for the insurance industry for claims from certain terrorist attacks.

Insurers are better prepared to face the hurricane season this year, after the harsh 2004 season forced them to learn how to more effectively interpret the information they get from catastrophe (CAT) modeling systems, according to Risk Management Solutions (RMS), a Newark, Calif., provider of products and services for the management of catastrophe risk. At press time, RMS estimated that losses from Hurricane Dennis were likely to be between $1 and $3 billion.The two million claims produced from the 2004 season were a catalyst that encouraged companies to improve their understanding of the models, much like Hurricane Andrew in 1992 pushed catastrophe modeling into the mainstream, says Kyle Beatty, meteorologist with RMS.

March 2002: Upset about the size of his annual bonus, a global financial services employee planted a "logic bomb" that deleted 10 billion customer records. The incident affected more than 1,300 of the company's servers throughout the United States. The company sustained losses of approximately $3 million-the amount required to repair damage and reconstruct deleted files.

Information technology is generally the wildcard in any company's annual budget. Unpredictable in cost and difficult to explain to the layman, IT is one cost center that can be relied upon to keep executives up at night.Given that upper-level executives are not generally also computer experts, methods for riding herd on IT projects had to be devised.

Imagine leaving your sales and marketing efforts to guesswork. Not understanding your customer's age, lifestyle, income or other factors would spell certain disaster for any insurance carrier trying to market or cross-sell specific products.Amica Life Insurance, a wholly owned subsidiary of Amica Mutual Insurance Company, is one company that decided to attack its marketing efforts with statistical intelligence.

The South African insurer has consolidated customer data from 15 disparate sources into one worksite marketing information system that provides a 360-degree view of its customers for its advisors.Talk to just about any insurance executive whose company embarked on a customer relationship management (CRM) initiative in the early 1990s and you'll likely hear a similar story. "Dirty data" often played a key role in the failure of those projects to deliver the expected results.

When most insurance companies look to new technology to improve business operations, the focus typically is on saving time or money by taking a manual process and automating it.In reviewing the time required to bring their new products to market and give their agents an efficient means to do business, American Reliable Insurance Co., a subsidiary of Assurant Inc., decided time was money.

Insurance firms must perform more due diligence if they want their Web sites to net them greater revenues. That is one of the crucial messages of a recent study from Forrester Research, a Cambridge, Mass.-based technology and market research firm, as a litany of mergers and acquisitions (M&A) and a blur of technology offerings in the Web analytics field make insurers' search for the ideal vendor a murky proposition.The Forrester report, titled "How Web Analytics Buyers Structure Contracts," indicates that too many companies are rashly choosing vendors to tackle a very important element of their success strategies: maximizing their business on the Internet.

No single strategic objective in the insurance industry offers the profit potential of policyholder retention and cross-selling. It has been documented that multi-relationship policyholders are more likely to renew.Further, the cost to sell renewals and additional policies to current customers is dramatically less than initial customer acquisition costs.

Kansas City, Mo - The officers and members of the National Association of Insurance Commissioners (NAIC) have decided to cancel the Fall National Meeting, which was scheduled for September 10-13 in New Orleans. Approximately 1,500 insurance regulators, industry representatives and interested parties had registered to attend the conference.

Dublin, Ireland - The U.S. insurance industry has fully emerged from a rough patch at the early part of the decade, according to Research and Markets, a Dublin research firm. Both life and non-life carriers are currently experiencing a period of relative stability, and have reassessed their technology opportunities. In its report, which examines how U.S. insurance technology strategies have evolved over the past 18-24 months, Research and Markets asserts that claims processing will continue to be the focal point of IT spending for non-life insurers through 2008. Overall spending growth will moderate around 2007 as the bulk of costly system rationalization and standardization efforts will be either underway by then, says the firm.