The Automated Exec

A glimpse inside the personal technology arsenal and strategies that empower today's leading insurance IT professionals.

Improving data quality is a huge challenge for global reinsurers such as Transamerica Reinsurance, which on a daily basis receives massive amounts of information from primary insurers and manages millions of individual policies. To meet that challenge, Thomas Freitas, senior vice president of technology and operations, and his team recently developed a platform that provides a central repository for all its electronic data.

Running on Oracle, the Policy Development Data Store, or PODS as it is known throughout the company, provides ready access to all of Transamerica Reinsurance's policy-level information. Such centralized access has helped the company boost its performance management, align and leverage new business partners, enhance its validation processes, better meet compliance requirements, and improve its ability to conduct mortality studies.

“Because there's a lack of applied industry standards, we receive data in a lot of different forms from our clients,” Freitas says. “We put a lot of energy into transforming all these various forms of data into standards we then can store and use to drive our business processes.”

Based in Charlotte, N.C., Transamerica Reinsurance is a division of Transamerica Occidental Life Insurance, a subsidiary of The Netherlands-based AEGON group. Transamerica Reinsurance supplies reinsurance solutions to more than 500 life insurance and financial service companies in North America, Latin America, and Asia Pacific.

Freitas joined the company eight years ago as manager of application development. In 1998, he became CIO. He was promoted to his current position in 2003 and oversees more than 130 employees in IT and operations.

After earning his bachelor's degree in computer science from Boston College, Freitas went to work for American Computer Group as a database administrator and programmer. In 1986, he moved to New York and began climbing the ranks in management, finance, and software development at various brokerage companies, including what is now Prudential Securities as well as E.F. Hutton and Bankers Trust. He earned a master's degree in business administration from Fordham University in 1992.

Freitas calls his current position overseeing both operations and IT at Trans-america Reinsurance a “perfect marriage” because so many of the company's operational challenges are related to using data effectively to drive business value.

To that end, in addition to continuously supporting and enhancing PODS, Freitas and his team are focusing on developing a Web-based knowledge management product to leverage the process intelligence they have built in the central repository.

“We have good operating metrics around our core business processes today, and now we want to take those metrics and come up with business intelligence we then can share throughout the organization to help our managers make better business decisions around all this data,” he explains.

To help him perform his myriad duties at Transamerica Reinsurance, Freitas relies on what he calls “all-around communication tools,” such as e-mail, Excel, Web search engines, cell phones, a Dell laptop, and a BlackBerry. “For people who do a lot of e-mail, the BlackBerry is one of the best things ever invented,” he asserts.

At home, Freitas jokes the only technology he likes to use is the remote for his wide-screen TV. “I usually like to 'de-technology' when I'm home,” he says.

He does enjoy playing GameCube games with his children and confesses he often is asked to help solve technology problems related to one of the family's two home PCs. “I haven't weaned my wife off of using me as the Help Desk yet,” he says.

Two items on Freitas's technological wish list are search engines that can look for both structured and unstructured data and wireless networks. He would like to use a wireless network both at work and home. “I haven't quite figured out how to make a good business case for it at work yet, but I do think a wireless network would help us more easily perform team-based work,” he says.

From Freitas's point of view, wireless networks, central database repositories, and knowledge management products are all ways the data-driven insurance industry can use technology as a competitive advantage.

“Although managing massive amounts of data still is a big challenge,” he observes, “we have so many more opportunities to use technology to leverage that data than we ever did before.”

Sharon Baker is a freelance business writer based in Charlotte, N.C.

Special Reports /

Thomas Freitas, Transamerica Reinsurance

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