The Innovation Group, a provider of business process servicesand software solutions to the insurance industry, releases a newversion of Insurer Conversion, the conversion component for theInnovation Insurer suite.

Based on industry trends, research, and experience, insurersrequire data conversion capabilities beyond the implementation of anew policy management system including: business strategy change,merger and acquisition, divestment of a company or line ofbusiness, product consolidation, adding new data to improvecustomer experience, systems consolidation or BPO.

Many insurers view policy conversions as a high-risk endeavorbased on past experience. However, successful policy dataconversions are critical to both renewal and growth for insurancecompanies.

“Insurers are under pressure to modernize and streamlineinsurance processing with new policy administration solutions,while establishing a platform for business agility and growth,”says Andy Roberts, Group CEO for Innovation Group. “InsurerConversion provides a robust, modern conversion tool to convertpolicy data to Insurer Policy. Insurer Policy and InsurerConversion provide an integrated solution for insurers to meetpolicy management needs and a platform that opens up businessoptions for growth.”

“The addition of data conversionfunctionality, building on Innovation Group's experience andexpertise, is a strong addition to the Innovation Insurer suite,”says Craig Beattie, analyst in the insurance practice for Celent.“Data conversion tooling helps insurers improve speed, mitigaterisk and realize the full value of new system implementations,policy migration projects as well as projects absorbing new datainto the organization.”

Innovation Conversion leverages the Innovation Insurerenterprise data model as the central reference data modelforstandardized data definitions, data formats, and datarelationships to ensure data consistency. The data model is easilyextendable to accommodate any unique data elements used within aninsurer's business.

Insurer Conversion includes a toolkit and methodology, EMILA,which leverages “best practice” processes and routinesincluding:

• Extract: Retrieval of data from legacy systems based onpre-agreed exclusion criteria with a fully reconcilable audit trailand set of reports.
• Map: Apply target validation and data mapping rules.Restructure the data into interface files, representing thegroupings needed for the integrity stage and report results foraudit.
• Integrity: Create tables being representations of targetsystem. Enhance data passed into this stage to include all targetinformation beyond the data provided at new business. Eliminateduplicate clients, addresses and phone numbers. Create a fullyreconcilable audit trail and reports.
• Load: Create load files in a format ready for load to targettables using the representation provided by the integrity stage.Report results to the audit manager and final reports confirmingthe success of the conversion.
• Audit: Create all required counts, calculations and formulaerequired to confirm the success of the conversion whilst providingfunctionality to reconcile the figures and report both successesand failures at all stages of the process.