Policy adminstration

Mobile devices and network capabilities will lead growth areas in IT and information management in 2012, with cloud services adoption and enablement not far behind, according to IDC’s annual market predictions.

AXIS Capital Holdings Ltd.’s insurance segment named John Van Decker EVP and head of North American professional lines.

With a bearish market persisting, IT is expected to deliver miracles without the luxury of economic hardship as an excuse.

FirstBest Systems Inc., a provider of insurance software solutions for insurance carriers, has upgraded its FirstBest Front Office Suite’s underwriting workstation, agent portal and upload applications. The applications now enable account-based underwriting for multi-line insurers and mono-line insurers selling multiple policies for a single risk.

A survey of 120 U.S. P&C insurers finds them increasingly leveraging social media platforms for business purposes. Conducted by IVANS, an electronic communications services provider, the study notes that return on investment for social media initiatives can be difficult to measure and says that carriers must work with their distribution partners to ensure a cohesive strategy.

Today's high national unemployment rate is misleading and irrelevant. The insurance industry is being drained of talent and experience—a trend that's going to impact the industry and its customers for years to come—and could soon be short-staffed.

Despite the hype around new areas like mobile, social media, and cloud, the story of insurer IT budgets and projects for 2012 is one of continuity. Insurers are investing, through replacements and enhancements, in delivering the business capabilities needed to support growth, achieve competitive parity and improve operational effectiveness. But most insurers still think of IT as a self-contained area. And few have truly integrated it into operational planning in the way that companies will need to as the broad changes in information technology sweeping through the economy start to drive change in the basic assumptions of the insurance industry.

If you had to pick an industry to go paperless, insurance might seem an unlikely choice. Core processes for insurers typically are paper-intensive. What's more, as a whole, the industry has been somewhat slow to adopt new processes and technologies.

Insurers are always on the lookout for ways to spot fraud, and with good reason. The instances of fraud, and the variety of fraudulent activities, continue to rise.

1. Risk Management/ Climate Control

If IT spend is any indication of insurers' intentions, consider the planned major strategic projects such as core system replacements or enhancements proof that modernization is a continuous process.

Life insurers need to craft mitigation strategies for a prolonged low-rate environment.

Of all the trends set to impact the insurance industry in 2012, the wide use of business analytics across the enterprise was likely the easiest to foresee.

Daily, there's news affecting health insurers. What's becoming clear is that transparency is a demand from consumers and regulators that health insurers are going to have to keep up with.

Fraud is on the rise in the United States and globally, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers’s 2011 Global Economic Crime Survey, with cyber crime making the most significant increase in the two years since the firm’s last survey.

Glatfelter Insurance Group, a multifaceted insurance broker and MGA/program manager, and SPARTA Insurance Co., a property/casualty carrier dedicated to writing program business with Program Administrators as well as retail agents, share few things in common.

A recent study of IT spending among small businesses (from $40 million to $350 million in annual revenue) reveals that the budgets will grow slowly. The report—“IT spending and staffing forecast for 2012”— from Computer Economics predicts IT operational budgets should grow about 2.0 percent at the median for small organizations and 0.5 percent for medium ($350 million to $1 billion in revenue) and 0.8 percent for large (revenue of $1 billion or greater) organizations. Growth in the financial services sector, including banks and insurance companies, is weaker than other sectors—health care, professional and technical services, and distribution and manufacturing—but the net trend is still positive.

It’s no secret that the Green Bay Packers are chasing perfection this season. But what many might not know is that they are quietly leveraging their success to help bring health tips to fourth grade classrooms across the state of Wisconsin.

Properly going through the steps leading up to an IT project, means that by the time actual work begins, the battle should be more than half over.

Foreign insurers are meeting a wall of resistance as they try to penetrate the Chinese market, new analysis from Moody's indicates.