From August 2009 Resource

Spotlight on Solutions

Exhibitors at the ACORD LOMA Insurance Systems Forum featured products and services to help insurers improve their operations.

How does a company win in an economic downturn? According to futurist David Smith, who spoke at the recent ACORD LOMA Insurance Systems Forum, doing nothing in a downturn can be dangerous. Recessions are good time to refocus, make investments in the future and be positioned to grow when the economy improves, he said. With that as background, many exhibitors at the ACORD LOMA Insurance Systems Forum made service announcements and unveiled new products and services to help insurers improve their operations and capabilities. Here are some of those:

EDS Enhances Electronic Notification Solution

EDS, an HP company, announced key enhancements to its electronic notification solution for the insurance industry, including features that enable insurers to reduce costs and improve customer satisfaction while complying with underwriting
market regulations.

EDS*SEND Electronic Notification Services enable the automated, electronic exchange of policy-related notifications among insurers, lenders, leasing companies, government agencies and trackers. The EDS*SEND enhancements include a comprehensive web portal with archive and new return mail processing capabilities.

"As one of the largest property and casualty insurance companies in the nation, Southern Farm Bureau Insurance has relied on EDS*SEND for almost 15 years to facilitate cost-effective, secure and efficient transmittal of information," said Mickey Nugent, senior vice president of operations at Southern Farm Bureau Casualty Insurance Company. "Automating the paper-intensive notification process has helped us significantly lower cost, improve productivity and enhance information exchange, which ultimately helps us keep our customers satisfied."

By using electronic delivery methods, insurers are able to lower costs and reduce the amount of paper required for printing and distributing insurance information. Costs are further reduced by eliminating postage for delivery. EDS estimates that using EDS*SEND to manage lien holder notifications may save a client up to 50 percent of the costs of operations.

The new EDS*SEND web portal allows authorized personnel to verify coverage through access to an integrated two-year archive of each insurer’s transactions. This reduces the need for manual document recovery requests and limits inquiries into each insurer’s call center by lenders and other interested third parties. The result yields time and money savings. Additionally, lenders can verify policy coverage details for multiple borrowers with multiple insurers. This minimizes risk and results in better accuracy and compliance with loan contract requirements.

The new EDS*SEND return mail processing capabilities include electronic address correction information from the U.S. Postal Service. This information is used to create a powerful tool for forwarding and tracking returned mail automatically.

Created in 1994, EDS*SEND has more than 3,000 financial trading partners totaling more than 37,000 electronic delivery endpoints. In 2008, EDS processed more than 46.3 million lien holder notifications.

As a pioneer of technology services for the financial services industry, EDS provides a wide range of outsourced and consulting services – from payments and securities processing to applications development, as well as network, customer relationship management and help desk services – to all sectors of the industry.

Vertafore Reports Record Transactions

Vertafore, a leading provider of software and services to the insurance industry, announced that TransactNOW® and PL Rating™ facilitated more than 3.4 million agency-carrier transactions in the first quarter of 2009, representing an 80 percent increase over the same period in 2008. The strong first quarter results show that agency-carrier connectivity has reached a critical mass, with more carriers enabling real-time transactions through Vertafore’s systems and more agencies taking advantage of
this connectivity.

The shift in behavior allows agencies to leverage Vertafore’s industry-leading connectivity solutions to achieve greater efficiency and productivity, providing significant cost and time savings to both agencies and carriers. In addition, with real-time connectivity, rating agencies and carriers are able to write more business in a shorter period of time. Vertafore’s solutions help carriers and MGAs with a major challenge: efficiently integrating with hundreds of thousands of desktops that use agency management and comparative quoting solutions available from Vertafore and other vendors.

"Our strong first quarter transaction numbers provide clear evidence that real-time connectivity is now the mainstream way for agencies and carriers to interact," said Susanna Morgan, senior vice president, product strategy and marketing with Vertafore. "For agencies and carriers looking to maximize their time, save money and increase sales, Vertafore’s solutions can provide a significant
competitive advantage."

Vertafore also announced that it now leads the market with 338 carriers and MGAs in production with real-time connectivity and download capabilities, giving agencies a wide range of options to meet their customers’ coverage needs. The growing base of users leads directly to increased activity, and Vertafore’s transaction numbers are trending up. In 2009 the company is averaging 57,000 real-time rating and quoting transactions per day; in January, the total number of real-time transactions topped 1 million for the first time.

"Allied has been a longtime supporter of the use of technology in our business processes," said Doreen I. LaMacchia, Training and Development Associate at Allied North America Insurance Brokerage of New York, LLC. "We are pleased with the efficiency and simplicity of Vertafore’s real-time connectivity to Personal Lines Carriers."

Vertafore also announced that its ImageRight content management and workflow solution recently won several industry awards during the ACORD-LOMA Insurance Systems Forum. .

"The insurance organizations that use Vertafore’s ImageRight solution every day are the real winners here," said Matt McKernan, president of Vertafore’s Carrier & MGA Markets Division. "We work collaboratively with clients to make sure Vertafore’s products solve everyday business problems. This commitment helps us create and maintain the raving fan customers who helped to determine the winners of these awards. This recognition validates that our work in the insurance market is on the right track."

Perot Systems Corporation has been awarded a 7-year IT services contract by super regional property-casualty insurance carrier The Main Street America Group. The agreement calls for Perot Systems to administer Main Street America’s infrastructure services through IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL)-based best practices and systems, which provides clients a single point of contact for resolving technical issues and application support while assisting with business requests. Additionally, Main Street America’s infrastructure services will be managed within Perot Systems’ data centers which will increase its flexibility, improve economies of scale, and reduce its operating costs. Financial terms of the agreement were not disclosed.

"As Main Street America’s trusted IT services provider, we look forward to helping them continue to deliver high-quality services to their customers in the years ahead," said Peter Altabef, Perot Systems president and CEO. "We are committed to helping Main Street America build and grow on its outstanding record of success in the property and casualty
insurance market."

Jacksonville, Florida-based Main Street America provides commercial, personal and surety products exclusively through independent insurance agents to individuals, families and small businesses in 24 states.

"We have partnered with Perot Systems to enhance the quality and performance of our infrastructure services so that we can serve our customers better," stated Ron James, CIO and vice president of information technology at Main Street America. "Perot Systems has a solid reputation, extensive quality resources and is a
recognized leader."

Perot Systems provides end-to-end business process, consulting, application and infrastructure solutions to the life insurance and annuity industries. The company currently manages over 3,000,000 policies for more than 30 leading life insurance and annuity providers across the world.

Camilion Solutions, a leading provider of insurance product development solutions and modern P&C policy administration systems that create product agility, announced the availability of innovative new insurance product lifecycle management functionality that is now available out of the box with both ProductAuthority(R) and Authority Suite(R). Called Lifecycle Manager, this functionality enhances and leverages the considerable functionality of ProductAuthority, a "pure" insurance product development solution, which also powers Authority Suite.

Applicable to both Property & Casualty and Life & Annuity insurers, Lifecycle Manager gives insurers visibility into the processes that track and manage key tasks and participants involved in product development and management to reduce product development costs, eliminate bottlenecks to improve speed to market, deliver quality products, and increase revenue by enabling concurrent development and modification of products. Lifecycle Manager is a web-based "desktop" that includes automated, collaborative workflows; a product catalog that houses that "one version of the truth" for every product; product compare capabilities that enable you to easily identify key features for re-use or modification across multiple products; and the ability to test products before they are integrated into downstream systems such as billing, claims and print. Lifecycle Manager workflows support processes related to: launching new and modified products, including forms drafting and review; state filing package creation and review; and state (DOI) filing management.

With the advanced workflow automation, task management and assignment capabilities, users come to one place - their Lifecycle Manager inbox - to see the work that is assigned to them. Users can also access a Worklist that provides visibility into all requests in the system. Users can drill down to specific tasks and see at-a-glance which tasks are completed and which are still in progress. Management also has visibility into product development and can measure how long the product development process takes from conception to launch and rapidly identify and address any bottlenecks to efficiently balance workloads and minimize delays. With the appropriate user permissions, work can easily be reassigned to other users as needed.

"Collaborating with CNA Insurance, we built Lifecycle Manager's advanced product development and management functionality and it is now available out-of-the-box with Authority Suite and ProductAuthority, said Ross Orrett, President & CEO, Camilion Solutions. "Highly configurable, Lifecycle Managercan also easily be customized to suit a customer's specific needs."

RGA Technology Partners, Inc. a wholly-owned subsidiary of Reinsurance Group of America, Incorporated, announced that Benesure Canada has launched its use of the AURA® Product Suite in Canada. AURA (Automated Underwriting and Risk Analysis) helps automate underwriting decisions, speeding up the time to issue a policy and greatly improving the data gathered about an applicant. Benesure Canada is using AURA to help mortgage brokers and lenders across Canada who use them to underwrite mortgage life and disability protection. Benesure found out about AURA through the Canadian reinsurer, RGA Canada Re.

"Benesure’s addition of AURA is part of a new trend we are seeing where carriers are using the product through an outsourcing service provider," said Jym Barnes, President and Chief Executive Officer, RGA Technology Partners, Inc. "We are excited to be working with Benesure in this kind of environment. Their industry expertise and high level of client service is something we are very proud to be a part of."

"Our clients are our focus, so anything we can do to improve our service to them is important." said Tina Bellavia, Vice President, Mortgage Broker Product Management and Operations, Benesure. "On the day we launched, AURA proved itself, helping us underwrite an applicant (that previously would have taken days) in just a matter of hours. Our goals are continuing to be met. We are thrilled to watch AURA streamline our processes and improve our time service for clients."

RGA also announced that iPipeline’s iGO e-App™ (intelligent fillable form) will now incorporate the use of AURA® Point of Sale automated underwriting technology for participating insurance companies. iPipeline’s platform powers sales tools for over 1,000 carriers, BGAs, banks, broker-dealers and agencies. Under the terms of the agreement, insurance companies can incorporate the power of AURA Automated Underwriting in iPipeline’s iGO e-App at the point of sale to reduce cycle times, increase placement ratios, and accelerate cash flow.

"We have already seen great success with AURA use in the hands of captive agents and tele-interviewers," said Jym Barnes, President and Chief Executive Officer, RGA Technology Partners, Inc. "iPipeline’s iGO e-App and AURA Automated Underwriting have many natural integration points that will aid brokers and agents during the sales cycle. We are very excited to be a part of iPipeline’s solution and certainly thrilled to see the use of AURA continue to grow in the broker channel."

PDMA Inc. announced the general availability of LifePRO Version 15®, a major technology upgrade to the life, health and annuity administration system.

With Version 15, the native LifePRO® application is developed in Fujitsu NetCOBOL for .NET and the Microsoft .NET framework. The .NET framework offers unparalleled interoperability and ease of integration with other systems, data access methods and languages. In addition, LifePRO Version 15 offers enhanced Microsoft SQL Server database optimization and management.

LifePRO® business enhancements include support for a new line of business – Credit Life and Disability Insurance – offering flexible product design, e-commerce support and XML based forms generation.

The upgrade also allows for a wide range of other new business features including expansion of support for annuity benefits such as Guaranteed Minimum Withdrawal Benefits, National Provider Identification Support for healthcare providers, and enhancements to Long Term Care products to include benefit inflation based on the Consumer Price Index and Restoration of Benefits functionality.

PDMA is an insurance software development company based in Indianapolis, IN. PDMA’s LifePRO® administrative solution provides flexible support for a broad range of life, health and annuity products. LifePRO® streamlines policy administration through features such as a central product rules engine, real time customer service and flexible agent compensation support.

Contact Resource at resource@loma.org