Data security

Hartford, Conn. - Travelers now offers new resources to assist businesses with disaster preparedness planning. Two new online tools and a new Safety Academy class, titled "Business Continuity Planning," have been added to help Travelers customers create customized disaster recovery plans that will ensure optimum business continuity in the event of exposures from natural or manmade disasters.Bob Brody, senior vice president, Travelers Risk Control, says, "Emergency planning should be at the top of every "To Do" list for today's businesses. With more than a century of experience in risk control, Travelers is uniquely positioned to help its customers anticipate and respond to a wide spectrum of exposures from catastrophic risks faced by businesses and homeowners."

Kansas City, Mo. - The National Association of Insurance Commissioners (NAIC) voted to amend its Model Regulation Requiring Annual Audited Financial Reports, commonly known as the Model Audit Rule. The amendments relate to auditor independence, corporate governance, and internal control over financial reporting.

Boston-- AIR Worldwide President and CEO Karen Clark will advise members of Congress and their senior staff today that hurricanes and earthquakes have the potential to cause insured losses in excess of $150 billion and total economic losses approaching $500 billion. Clark is participating in a seminar at the U.S. Capitol Building hosted by the Congressional Research Service (CRS) titled "Insuring and Mitigating Risks of Large-Scale Disasters: Is Federal Disaster Insurance Needed?""There are many potential natural catastrophe scenarios resulting in insured property losses exceeding $100 billion," says Clark. "Examples include a Category 5 hurricane making landfall in Miami, which could result in insured losses of more than $130 billion, and a large magnitude earthquake in the Central U.S., which could result in insured losses of more than $150 billion."

Okemos, Mich. - Minnesota Department of Commerce has implemented Sircon for States, a Web-based solution from Sircon Corp., making Minnesota the 14th state to adopt the online compliance technology for producer licensing and appointment.The conversion from a legacy system to a hosted solution is aimed at increasing the online services Minnesota provides to insurance carriers, agencies and producers across the country, enabling customers to connect with the Minnesota Department of Commerce 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Tampa, Fla. - Ninety-five percent of companies had inaccurate information on the number and configuration of their IT assets, according to study of IT asset management (ITAM) programs conducted by TekMethods LLC, a provider of IT asset management (ITAM) consulting services and solutions. The research findings also showed that for many enterprises that do have inventories of technology assets, the data is out of date, resulting in inaccurate financial and tax statements.In order for a company to be in full compliance with Sarbanes-Oxley, corporate executives need to be fully aware of all the technology assets owned by the enterprise and must certify financial reports. The potential risks of non-compliance include costly fines, jail sentences and damages to a company's financial health and reputation.

Chanhassen, Minn. - Only 22% of companies have implemented a storage security solution, while nearly 67% believe their companies were either somewhat or extremely vulnerable to data security breaches. These are the findings of a recent survey conducted by Datalink, an independent information storage architecture firm.Regarding host security, 61% felt that their companies were either somewhat or extremely vulnerable. Whereas, 58% of respondents worried that their company's network was not as secure as it could be.

From call centers to data centers, the insurance industry continues to turn to outsourcing in an effort to manage costs and secure access to resources. Information technology assets have become vital to ongoing operations and new growth, making these outsourcing relationships more than technology arrangements-they are now critical to business success. Combined with new regulatory mandates, this trend may be forcing carriers to push deeper and engage more proactively with outsourcing vendors.IT industry analyst firm Gartner Inc., Stamford, Conn., calculates that outsourcing will capture up to 33% of all IT services spending across industries by 2008-up from 26% in 2003. The analyst firm also predicts the insurance sector will be spending more than $10 billion on outsourced services by that time.

SAFECO NAMES WILLIAM JENKS AS CIO

NEW CSF DESIGNER FEATURESMetavante Corp., Milwaukee, has added a number of features to its CSF Designer document composition application:

Insurance CFOs seem to be get-ting a bad rap. According to a recent study, insurance finance executives are so busy dealing with compliance obligations and administrative duties, they are finding it difficult to support their CEOs' growth initiatives.Developed in cooperation with The Economist Intelligence Unit, a London-based provider of industry analysis information, IBM's 2005 Global CFO Study reflects the responses of some 900 senior finance executives across the communications, distribution, financial, industrial and public sectors in 74 countries. Of those 900, 44 respondents came directly from the insurance industry.

The NAIC formation of a task force to examine climate change comes on the heels of devastating back-to-back hurricane seasons that caused a record $30 billion in U.S. insured losses in 2004 and as much as $60 billion in insured losses from Hurricane Katrina alone in 2005. Insurance Networking News magazine recently interviewed Tim Wagner, director of the Nebraska Department of Insurance, who is co-leading the task force, to find out what the NAIC hopes to achieve.INN: Who at the NAIC became aware of the issue, and how was it pushed forward on the agenda?

Last year was a turning point for cyber attacks. It was the year when the predominant threats on the Internet transitioned from being perpetrated by hobbyist hackers to criminals.This is according to a recent report issued by Counterpane Internet Security Inc., a Mountain View, Calif.-based provider of network protection services, and MessageLabs Ltd., a provider of messaging security with regional headquarters in New York City.

For some time now, insurance companies have made technology investments a priority. The result? Instead of disparate, paper-based information residing in hard-to-access metal file cabinets, all kinds of e-data languish in disconnected computer systems.Now, insurance companies are realizing that if they do not find a better way to use this data, the whole foray into information technology might go for little more than naught. That's where performance management "scorecard" systems come into play.

ADOBE, ITEMFIELD JOIN FORCES ON E-FORMS DEALItemfield, a San Mateo, Calif., provider of data transformation software, will work with San Jose-based Adobe Systems Inc., to develop a solution designed for the insurance industry. The companies plan to combine Adobe's intelligent forms, which support the ACORD XML data standard, with Itemfield's process-specific business rules and complex data transformation capabilities to help insurers increase efficiency by accelerating the processing of transactional data in electronic forms, such as quotations and new business submissions.

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.

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.

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.