Core systems

Insurance companies are quite accustomed to living with regulations. With each state promulgating its own requirements, carriers consider investments of time and resources for state filing and reporting as a fundamental cost of doing business.But several federal laws enacted over the last few years are ratcheting up the costs and complexity of regulatory compliance for the insurance industry, which is forcing carriers to consider a broader role for technology in their compliance programs.

Many insurance companies have been chasing after the people who have a lot of money to invest and protect-high net-worth individuals. But the Principal Financial Group has taken a leap for "the little guy'-middle-class consumers who probably don't have enough life and disability insurance to protect their families."We were getting a steady chant from our advisors that we weren't doing enough to support them at that basic level-selling life insurance and disability protection," says Jerry Patterson, vice president of marketing for the life & health division of The Principal Financial Group.

The Contracts Update section includes announcements of contracts insurance information technology companies have signed with customers in recent weeks. Contract news can be faxed to Insurance Networking magazine at (312) 913-1366 or by electronic mail to Stephen.Dwyer thomsonmedia.com AFNI INSURANCE SERVICES

SEATTLE, Aug. 2--Safeco today announced it has completed the sale of its Life & Investments (L&I) operation to an investor group led by White Mountains Insurance Group, Ltd., and Berkshire Hathaway Inc. Safeco completed the sales of Safeco Trust Company in April 2004 and Talbot Financial Corporation in July 2004.

PEARL RIVER, NY--41 states are now accepting the ACORD Life Form Life Application Part 1, ACORD announced. This is a major step in a multi-year initiative and is supported by numerous life insurance companies and associations, including NAILBA and NAVA.

Independent insurance distributors in seven western states now can get accurate Safeco auto and home insurance quotes without leaving their EZLynx Web portal at www.ezlynx.com.

ACE USA's ACE TankSafe will now offer above-ground coverage. ACE TankSafe is the Philadelphia-based insurer's Web-based underwriting facility for underground storage tanks. It enables contracted brokers to conduct automated underwriting transactions from submission to issuance. ACE TankSafe is offered through ACE Casualty Risk's environmental underwriting unit and targets underground and above-ground storage tank insurance products, from the small tank policies to large industrial portfolios.

PORTLAND, Ore.-- Standard Insurance Company, a subsidiary of StanCorp Financial Group, Inc. has appointed Brad Nantz as vice president of Sales and Ellen Steel as vice president of Operations for the Employee Benefits Division.

Grange Insurance, Columbus, Ohio, has licensed EDR InSight, a set of solutions designed for claims professionals to facilitate the use of automotive Event Data Recorder (EDR) or "black box" data in the claims evaluation process.Grange will use EDR InSight, provided by Injury Sciences LLC, San Antonio, to identify vehicles with harvestable black box data. Grange claim representatives will use EDR InSight to schedule harvesting services from a network of mobile service providers and for analysis and interpretation of the EDR data.

BOSTON--John Hancock Life Insurance Company has quadrupled the long-term care insurance (LTCI) operations professionals who support the sale of its LTCI products from 6 staff members to 24. The expanded support enhances service for its existing LTCI channels including career agents, its national account team, managing general agents (MGAs) and banks, and allows the company to serve two new channels, brokerage general agents (BGAs) and broker-dealers.

Zurich Financial Services, a global insurance provider, has signed a seven-year agreement to outsource all application development and support services for its businesses in the U.S., the United Kingdom, Germany and Switzerland, to Computer Sciences Corp.

BOSTON--The American Insurance Association (AIA) is pushing Congress for a two-year extension of the Terrorism Risk Insurance Act (TRIA), an extension that AIA says will help avoid destabilizing the insurance market and the economy, and will enable policymakers to develop a more permanent solution for managing our nation's economic exposure to catastrophic terrorism.

WELLESLEY HILLS-- Sun Life Financial announced today that its U.S. Group Insurance Division has reorganized its distribution organization into six regions, a new structure necessitated by the rapid expansion of its division and the commitment to provide local service to brokers and customers. To lead operations in these new regions, Sun Life Financial has named four new regional vice presidents (RVPs), to serve alongside two existing RVPs. All six of the RVPs report to Drew Niziak, Vice President, Distribution.

Nationwide Financial is enabling its life agents and distributors to streamline business processes using a Web-based system from NaviSys Inc., Edison, N.J. The system enables Nationwide's distributors and agents--more than 15,000 producers--to use the Web-based tools to propose universal life, variable universal life, term and whole life products to their clients.Nationwide is upgrading its illustration system and will begin using the new system by early fall. Nationwide will also implement in 2005 another component of the NaviSys suite, a Web-based electronic application that uses reflexive questioning to capture the information required for underwriting and policy issue. The application automatically accepts data from the illustration system, so representatives will need to enter customer data only once.

Cyber Security Industry Alliance (CSIA), a Washington, D.C.-based CEO public policy and advocacy group composed of security software, hardware and service vendors to address key cyber security issues, has released its recommendations for the development of a secure electronic health care system.These recommendations are designed to support the nation's first strategic framework report on a 10-year initiative to develop electronic health records and other uses of health information technology, which was announced today by Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Tommy G. Thompson and David J. Brailer, M.D., Ph. D., the National Health Information Technology Coordinator.

Safeco today announced strong second-quarter results, reflecting the company's solid underwriting and the competitive strength of its automated sales platform. In addition, weather-related catastrophe losses were relatively light for the second quarter. The company posted net income of $247.5 million -- or $1.77 per diluted share. This represents an increase over second-quarter 2003 net income, which was $111.9 million--or $0.81 per diluted share.

A recent poll of more than 3,000 independent agents reveals that the overall ease of doing business is a critically important factor in choosing a carrier with which to place business. The survey, conducted by Deep Customer Connections, Inc. also revealed a widening gap between agents' expectations and carriers' performance. "The gap between expectations and performance tripled on five of the 10 factors of ease of doing business," noted Paul Croke, a founding partner for the Scituate, Mass.-based consulting firm. That occurred despite the fact that the insurance industry as a whole improved fractionally on all 10 ease of doing business factors. The Web survey was sent to over 40,000 independent insurance agencies and brokerages nationwide. There were nearly 3,200 responses with more than 100 different carriers being rated. The 10 ease of doing business factors identified by Deep Customer Connections are:

New York--Fitch Ratings has revised its Rating Outlook for the U.S. commercial lines insurance sector to Stable from Negative. Fitch had maintained a Negative Rating Outlook on the sector since September 2000.

WebMD Corp., Elmwood Park, N.J., has released a white paper on the implementation of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) that concludes the law's administrative simplification provisions are increasing in complexity and costs for healthcare providers and payers across the country.The White Paper, which is the result of WebMD's analysis of HIPAA implementation nationwide, identifies concrete steps that the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services can take to steer the implementation back on course, through what the company calls a "rational roll- out plan."

Allstate Insurance Co., Northbrook, Ill., filed a half-million dollar lawsuit against a Philadelphia chiropractic clinic, All-Care Chiropractic, alleging fraudulent billing practices for insurance claims involving patients with personal injury lawsuits.The suit alleges that All-Care owners and operators Richard Walinsky, D.C. and Eileen Nelson Means, D.C. fraudulently billed Allstate for treatments that were never performed, over billed for services that were performed and used improperly licensed and unsupervised personnel for in-home patient visits.