Policy adminstration

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.

Hartford, Conn. - The Hartford Financial Services Group Inc., headquartered in Hartford, Conn., has created a new office in the greater Chicago area dedicated solely to processing claims that arise out of catastrophic events.The new catastrophe office will function as part of The Hartford's existing property claim operations in Chicago, and will focus on significant losses that arise from either man-made or natural disasters.

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.

Springfield, Mass. - Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance Co., Springfield, Mass., is taking podcasting to new levels by using it to provide its field sales force with company news, product information and marketing tips.

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."

Chicago - UniCare has launched a newly redesigned and improved secure member Web site designed to provide members and their families more streamlined access to personalized online health and benefit information.The changes make the site easier to navigate by requiring fewer clicks in order for members to access information specific to their health care needs, according to UniCare. The site now provides members easier access to personal online health information through single sign-on log-in capabilities. In addition, if members have misplaced or forgotten their username, they can request it online without having to call customer service support.

Cleveland - Members can do everything from determining deductibles to accessing claims information on the redesigned Web site of Consumers Life Insurance Co. at http://www.consumerslife.com/.Creating a Web presence that would help members better understand and use their health insurance benefits was a priority, according to Chris Hoffman, manager of Internet communications.

Hartford, Conn. - Aetna Global Benefits, the international business of Aetna, is offering a new feature for its members: payment of applicable wire transfer fees for international health care claim reimbursements. In the past, members who received their claims reimbursements through wire transfers were responsible for any transaction fees charged by their banks. AGB has the capability to issue these claims reimbursements in over 100 currencies."By covering these fees, which could be in excess of $25 (U.S.) per transaction, we feel that we significantly improve one of the ways that members currently receive claim reimbursements," says Martha Temple, head of Aetna Global Benefits (AGB). "This is part of our continued effort to provide high-quality, concierge-level services to our members around the world."

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.

Newark, Calif. - In response to a growing insurance industry need, Risk Management Solutions (RMS) completed of a probabilistic model for assessing the risk of influenza pandemics across multiple countries.Many published studies have already illustrated the effects of various pandemic scenarios, most commonly a repeat of the 1918 influenza pandemic that had a mortality level of 0.67% in the U.S. and even more severe effects in other countries. Analysis of the virology and epidemiological science shows that more severe pandemics are possible, and probabilistic estimation of virus characteristics incorporating the recent H5N1 suggests that there is a one in five chance of a pandemic that is more severe than that experienced in 1918.