Data and information management

The insurance industry has been noticeably quiet about its use of insurance scoring over the past few years. And its silence has raised the ire of consumers and agents who suspect insurers are using the arcane methodology to sneak around state laws that prohibit them from discriminating against minorities and people with lower incomes.In November, several people filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court, Western District of Texas, San Antonio Division, against Allstate Insurance Co., accusing the carrier of using credit scoring to replace geographic redlining, which was forbidden years ago.

Proponents of federal insurance regulation have moved one step further toward their goal. Two bills have been introduced in Congress that would establish a new federal agency to charter insurance companies choosing to bypass the cumbersome state-by-state system.In December, U.S. Senator Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) proposed the National Insurance Chartering and Supervision Act. Then, in February, U.S. Representative John LaFalce (D-N.Y.) introduced the Insurance Industry Modernization and Consumer Protection Act. Both bills respond to lobbying from banking and insurance groups that want a simplified regulatory structure for licensing insurance companies.

The surety bond business has long been plagued by razor-thin profit margins, with many providers satisfied just to break even on the issuance of a new product.Most surety bond issuers therefore understand that success hinges on robust volume. But as providers strive to generate greater sales, they're confronted with a troubling reality: processing surety bonds, which are contractual agreements guaranteeing a certain behavior or fulfillment of an obligation, can be labor-intensive.

Last year was viewed as a coming out party for Enterprise Application Integration (EAI)-related investments in the insurance industry. A larger coalition of carriers made a commitment in 2001 to identify the role that EAI-and within it XML-plays within the context of their operations.Financial services firms spent more than $4 billion on EAI-related hardware, software or other services in 2001, and this year projections are they will spend almost $6 billion. By 2006, EAI expenditures will reach upwards of $12 billion, reports Newton, Mass.-based Meridien Research Inc.

The Internet has been around less than a decade, and already it has proved to be the quintessential double-edged sword-a potent weapon as well as a useful tool. The Melissa virus unleashed in 1999 cost companies as much as $385 million, followed shortly after by the Love Bug in 2000, which infected more than 10 million systems and cost businesses an estimated $10 billion.

The hardened insurance market, costly incidents of cyber crime, and a new ISO Electronic Data Liability endorsement, which provides clear limitations for cyber risks under its Commercial General Liability standard-are all factors driving commercial insurers to reevaluate their business liability coverage. And many of them are beginning to separate cyber coverage from commercial general liability coverage."You're clearly starting to see traditional insurance policies getting much clearer on their intent around cyber exposures," says Jon Farber, assistant vice president of global technology underwriting at St. Paul Cos. The St. Paul-based insurer is one of several commercial insurers offering cyber insurance. Others include Zurich North America, AIG, Chubb, and Lloyd's of London.

When Congress passed the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) in 1996, one of its major objectives was to reduce health care costs by simplifying administrative and financial transactions across the industry. At that time, national health spending was heading toward the $1 trillion mark annually, and studies proclaimed that "administrative simplification" could save anywhere from $40 billion to $70 billion per year.

Virtually no payers in a HIPAA readiness survey conducted in December by Gartner Inc., Stamford, Conn., indicated they had completed their selection of technology tools to comply with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act.But insurance companies are implementing privacy and security tools for their Web-based applications, and these tools will factor into their HIPAA privacy and security assessments.

Security isn't a new topic in business. Many years ago, businesses were concerned primarily with physically securing information within their facilities. We managed our companies' critical information on a "need-to-know" basis-if you needed to know, then the keeper of the information would share the information with you.With the advent of e-commerce and networked computers comes the added need to secure these networks. Businesses, including insurers, want to facilitate the sharing of relevant data while protecting proprietary and confidential data. And, of course, the need-to-know rule still applies.

Environmentalists should be happy about the new document scanning and imaging system at Prudential Group Insurance-because it's saving a lot of trees. The insurer's disability insurance customers should be pleased too-because it's enabling the company to process their claims more quickly.What had been a manual, paper-intensive process of receiving disability claim documents via fax machine or mail has been replaced by a nearly paperless operation.

Insurance CIOs report that the emerging mix of legacy and Web systems in their enterprises creates a set of integration challenges that dominate their list of IT priorities. Not only are these integration challenges technically demanding, they're becoming increasingly critical to the business of insurance.Spending on enterprise application integration (EAI) in the insurance sector reflects growing levels of commitment to achieve legacy-to-Web integration. Gartner Dataquest forecasts that worldwide spending on EAI-related services in the insurance sector is poised to grow from $654 million in 2000 to more than $1.7 billion in 2005.

When Allstate Insurance Co. announced its aggressive new business approach in November 1999, analysts praised the company for its bold leadership in the New Economy.

Biometric technology is in the throes of an identity crisis. Biometrics relies on matching algorithms that analyze the physical or behavioral traits that differentiate one individual from another, such as fingerprints, the retina or iris of the eye, or the patterns of an individual's voice.Through its use, financial institutions could reduce costs related to identity theft, while simultaneously assuring consumers that their financial assets are protected.

Five years ago, Security Insurance Co. was suffocating under the weight of paper files. The company's file room was packed to the point where the company had to place file racks in hallways, consuming office space that cost $20 per square foot.Space constraints weren't the only problems that the Alpharetta, Ga.-based carrier's paper filing system created. Call center representatives had to put customers on hold and ask a file room clerk to retrieve the caller's file just to answer routine questions. Moreover, only one person at a time could work on a customer's file during the underwriting process, a situation that didn't foster high worker productivity.

The expression "the sum of the parts is greater than the whole" has many tried-and-true applications. PwC Consulting is contributing its own technology-driven version of this axiom, and insurance carriers are in line to benefit.Last year, PwC Consulting, a business unit of New York-based PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP, unveiled an e-business solution for property/casualty insurers that the global management and consulting firm believes will alter how carriers invest in technology.

As it faced the unenviable task of selecting and then implementing a systems integration solution across its various business components, Cincinnati-based American Modern Insurance Group discovered a modern approach to an age-old problem.In late 2001, AMIG adopted a program known as the Virtual Insurance Community (VIC), the brainchild of PwC Consulting, a business unit of New York-based PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP. VIC is a pre-integrated, component-based e-business solution designed for processing insurance transactions.

In 1999, when PwC Consulting formulated the blueprint for its Virtual Insurance Community (VIC), one dynamic that drove the initiative was its ability to provide insurance carriers with a pre-integrated best-in-class technology solution.The global management and consulting firm, a business unit of New York-based PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP, developed VIC as a component-based e-business solution for property/casualty insurers-eventually to be offered to life, annuity and group health carriers. And while the Virtual Insurance Community offers best-of-breed solutions spanning a myriad of technology applications, carriers that adopt the program-via licensing or via an application service hosting model-will still be able to deploy various applications that they previously have built and mapped within their IT infrastructure.

As insurance carriers expand into financial services and provide multichannel access for customers, many agents are not going along with the new program.Both State Farm Mutual Automobile Insurance Co. and Allstate Insurance Co. were sued in November by their agent associations. The agent associations are claiming the carriers have breached their contracts with the agents by increasing agents' production quotas, reducing their commissions, coercing agencies to forward their phones to call centers, and selling insurance directly to customers over the Internet.

Electronic bill payment and presentment (EBPP) has experienced a mixed bag of interest among consumers, with payments of insurance premiums ranking low on their online bill-payment priority list.In fact, insurance carriers, along with utilities, telecommunications and mortgage companies, are among the businesses that are lagging behind in the expansion of EBPP, according to a recent report by Stamford, Conn.-based consulting firm Gartner Inc.

Within hours following the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, global insurers and reinsurers began the task of assessing the breadth and depth of the losses incurred by their businesses.With losses separated into five categories-property damage, business interruption, casualty, aviation and liability-estimates indicate that insurers worldwide may pay out as much as $70 billion as a result of the September 11 attacks in what will represent the most expensive disaster insurers have ever experienced.