Data and information management

UNIVERSAL SIGNS SEVEN-YEAR BPO AGREEMENTUniversal Insurance of North America, Sarasota, Fla., has signed a seven-year agreement with CGI Group Inc. valued at between $45 and $75 million for policy and accounting business process services (BPS). Montreal-based CGI will process Universal's personal lines (book of business) including homeowners, dwelling-fire, auto, and umbrella in Texas and Florida. CGI will continue to support Universal's business processing needs as they expand their services into new markets. As part of this agreement, CGI will open a processing facility in Tampa to support Universal Insurance and other Florida-based insurance customers. CGI will initially hire 50 professionals and expects staff to grow to more than 200 professionals over the next two years.

Business rules have become a hot topic. At an industry event such as ACORD/LOMA, you'll hear many vendors talk about having business rules. We've all been here before; the buzz makes it hard for many of us to consider what we really need in those rules that help us automate processes such as claims and underwriting. Much of what we are struggling with is whether we should buy proprietary business rules capabilities that have been built into our applications, or if we should demand that our application vendors use enterprise-strength business rules solutions.Let's discuss the spectrum of what business rules can be. First, flexibility is important. At one extreme is the ability to change parameters, such as age, within the pre-defined rules for a given decision. At the other extreme are flexible solutions, where any new rule that relates to the problem can be added. The first is great when the rules are known, consistent and won't change. But, often the original application design doesn't consider industry, market and legal changes that cause us to have to define new rules we had not considered might be needed. As we have seen over the past 20 years, flexibility is critical to our ability to keep our application current.

Hamilton, Bermuda - Accenture Ltd. launched a technology delivery center in Pune, India, for software outsourcing and systems integration services. The facility is Accenture's ninth delivery center in India and represents further expansion of the company's Global Delivery Network.The new delivery center provides application outsourcing and systems integration services across the full range of technology capabilities. The center develops capabilities in enterprise technologies from Germany-based SAP and Siebel (Oracle Corp., Redwood Shores, Calif.); Net-centric technologies like Java and Microsoft; business intelligence and testing.

Boston - AIR Worldwide Corp. (AIR) released Version 8.0 of CLASIC/2, CATRADER, and CATStation, AIR's catastrophe risk management systems. The version 8.0 releases include updates to several of AIR's catastrophe models and a number of software enhancements to make catastrophe analyses more efficient.

Las Vegas, Nev. - The Association for Cooperative Operations Research and Development (ACORD), Pearl River, N.Y., released the first component of the ACORD Standards Framework, the organization announced at its annual meeting this week. The framework, an initial content release (ICR) of the single business data/information dictionary, brings together three groups of information:

Fremont, Calif. - A recent study on underwriting in the $222 billion commercial lines insurance industry has revealed that U.S.-based property/casualty insurers are taking new approaches to risk assessment and acceptance to sustain profitable growth in their business. The study, commissioned by Infosys Technologies Ltd. and conducted by TowerGroup, was designed to assess the strategic direction and readiness of the commercial underwriting market, from both business and technology perspectives.The study found that P&C commercial insurance companies are choosing to make the strategic shift toward "flow" and "transaction" underwriting to build competitive advantage and gain profitable market shares. Flow underwriting promotes straight-through underwriting for risk classes that were previously underwritten through manual, subjective evaluation by underwriters.

Boston - Fidelity Investments and WebMD Health Corp. are expanding their relationship to integrate WebMD's health care cost planning tools with the Fidelity HSASM, Fidelity's health savings account (HSA) product launched in December.

Hartford, Conn. - If you heed the latest research, you, too, may be a mergers and acquisitions (M&A) statistic soon. Insurance industry mergers and acquisitions increased in 2005 to the highest level since 2001 and may foreshadow an acceleration of activity this year and the next, according to a new study by Conning Research and Consulting, Inc., Hartford, Conn.

Boston - American International Group Inc. (AIG) adopted a policy to manage risks and capture business opportunities posed by climate change, and the president of Ceres, a Boston-based national coalition of investors and environmental groups, applauds it. "I commend AIG for being the first U.S. insurance company to address climate risk," says Mindy Lubber. "This is an important step that signals to the market and policy makers that climate change is a critical insurance issue. We look forward to working with AIG to expand on this commitment."

Edison, N.J. - Software and integration service provider MajescoMastek, the U.S. subsidiary of Bombay-based Mastek, will introduce an enterprise service-oriented architecture (SOA) platform for life and annuity companies next week at the ACORD LOMA Insurance Systems Forum in Las Vegas.

Redmond, Wash.-The life insurance division of Pacific Life Insurance Co., a Newport Beach, Calif.-based provider of life insurance products and services, selected Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft Corp. to help standardize Pacific Life's data infrastructure, reducing overall costs and bringing improved business intelligence (BI) capabilities to more than 800 employees nationwide.The company's life insurance division was faced with a strong dependency between business and IT workers. Executives, business analysts, finance personnel and customer service groups that rely on corporate data found it difficult to access and analyze important business information due to Pacific Life's complex data schema.

Chicago - Aon Consulting announced that Thomas Avery and Bruce Pixley joined the company's high-tech investigations unit of its IT risk consulting group, which is a part of its Financial Advisory and Litigation Consulting Services practice. Aon Consulting is a division of Aon Corp., a Chicago-based provider of risk management services, insurance and reinsurance brokerage, management consulting, and specialty insurance underwriting,

Stamford, Conn.-Senior executives in the insurance industry are becoming increasingly concerned about their exposure to patent trolls. This concern is highlighted by the recent $600-million dollar settlement (in the field of telecommunications) that Research in Motion, makers of BlackBerry mobile email devices, had to pay to patent holding company NTP, to avoid having the courts shut down the Blackberry email system.LOMA will focus on this topic by hosting a presentation entitled Patent Trolls in the Insurance Industry at the upcoming LOMA Financial Inforum 2006 to be held in Las Vegas May 21-24, 2006.

Newtown Square, Pa., SAP AG has published a book, titled Enterprise Services for Financial Services: Taking SOA to the Next Level, which reveals the growing importance that service-oriented architecture (SOA) and enterprise services will play in banking and insurance organizations as the financial services industry continues to transform.As financial services companies face shifts in customer behavior, consolidation and increasing regulatory requirements, the book outlines a road map to better cope with these pressures and help simplify technology adoption.

Redmond, Wash. - In an effort to reduce millions of dollars of integration pain on the part of insurance customers, Microsoft Corp. is releasing a new architecture to assist insurance companies in developing service-oriented architectures (SOAs) and deploying pre-integrated software applications around core insurance business processes.The Microsoft Insurance Value Chain (IVC) Architecture v1.0, which will be demonstrated at the ACORD/LOMA Insurance Forum in Las Vegas this month and completed by late June, is an industry-standards-based approach designed to enable workflow across multiple insurance applications--on or off the Microsoft platform. The architecture is the result of newly launched integration labs, held monthly on Microsoft's Redmond, Wash., campus.

New York - The Group of North American Insurance Enterprises (GNAIE) has launched its newly redesigned Web site, http://www.insuranceaccounting.org, to serve as a central source of news, research and analysis on the development of accounting standards for insurance companies."An important part of the GNAIE mission is to communicate effectively with insurers worldwide as well as the U.S. and international accounting standards community. The new Web site is a crucial component of that communications endeavor," says Richard Carbone, chairman of GNAIE, who is CFO of Prudential Financial Inc.

Boston - AIR Worldwide Corp. issued a white paper titled, "Understanding Climatological Influences on Hurricane Activity: The AIR Near-term Catalog." The paper reviews the current state of research on climatological impacts on hurricane activity and explains the approach used to create AIR's near-term sensitivity catalog, which quantifies the influence of sea surface temperature (SST) forecasts on insured losses for the next five years."Our analyses confirmed the correlation between elevated sea-surface temperatures and overall hurricane activity in the Atlantic basin," says Karen Clark, president and CEO of AIR Worldwide Corp. "However, there is considerable uncertainty in the expected magnitude and time horizon of potentially elevated risk along the coastline and, most importantly, the impact on regional insured losses."

Richmond Hill, Ont. - In an effort to help IT security professionals make smarter purchasing decisions, ITinfosecure has enhanced its no-cost, online community and resource center for researching and evaluating the latest security products and services.Located at http://www.itinfosecure.com/, the site features a new collection of up-to-date and unbiased profiles on more than 100 vendors and 300 products and services. In addition to its new look and feel, the site now offers users a comprehensive virtual resource center with an easy-to-use searchable catalog, with nearly 2,000 Webcasts, white papers, case studies and data sheets.

Okemos, Mich. - The Pennsylvania Insurance Department has turned to Sircon Corp. and partner Thomson Prometric to streamline the state's resident licensing process.Pennsylvania insurance law requires that all individuals applying for an initial resident insurance producer license must be fingerprinted in order to facilitate background checks, which are performed by submitting fingerprint images to the FBI's Criminal Justice Information Services Division (CJISD) through the Pennsylvania State Police (PSP).

London - The majority of European insurers believe that Solvency II will improve their companies' risk and capital management functions, and half have already enacted formal programs to address the proposed European Union (EU) directive, according to results of a survey released today by Bermuda-based technology services company Accenture.