New Products Trend Continues At IASA Denver
Picking up on a trend seen just 12 days earlier at the ACORD conference in Orlando, the IASA Educational Conference and Business Show held here featured multiple new technology products aimed at cutting costs and boosting productivity.
While acknowledging that attendance at the conference was "down a bit from last year," IASA Executive Director Joe Pomilia said the group was "still pleased with the activities."
Many of the announcements at the conferenceheld June 1 through 4concerned technology products designed to help carriers improve IT efficiency and improve service while reducing costs.
Computer Sciences Corporation announced two new software systems for property-casualty insurers: Exceed, aimed at large insurers, and POINT IN, for small to mid-sized carriers. The products may be implemented in-house or accessed via the application service provider (ASP) model, in which it comes to the carrier over the Internet or a company intranet.
According to Austin, Texas-based CSC, Exceeddeveloped for carriers doing between $120 million and $5 billion in businessis designed to help insurers "reduce costs, improve service and react quickly to market changes." The software covers many areas of the insurance enterprise, including policy administration, underwriting, billing, claims, commissions, workflow, document management, image archiving and "business intelligence."
CSC said the software represents a three-year, $28 million investment and was developed in collaboration with a European insurer and three U.S. carriers, which CSC declined to identify. Also involved were customer chief information officer advisory groups and user group forums.
The product also includes tools to help users with product building, rating and work management, "reducing the burden on insurers technical resources," said CSC. Insurers can use Exceeds components independently or as an integrated application across all lines of business.
The company noted that Exceed uses Web-browser based screens to extend mainframe performance to distribution channels, including call centers, the Internet and mobile devices. Screen views are based on security levels and workflow needs.
As a thin client (ASP model) system, the product utilizes Web services based on ACORD XML standards, a CSC spokesperson said. Web services are Web-based applications that use open standards to interact with other Web-based applications.
Pricing for Exceed begins at "$100,000 or less" for single components in the system, and may range into the millions for more components, the spokesperson stated.
POINT IN is designed for carriers and managing general agents doing up to $500 million in annual business, said CSC. The product is a processing platform using XML-based architecture to integrate insurance processes, including policy administration, underwriting, claims, billing and reinsurance.
According to CSC, POINT IN consolidates policy information, third-party data and multiple software applications into a single, Web-based view. Automatic updates are available via the Internet. POINT IN requires "substantially fewer keystrokes to complete most insurance processes" than the companys previous software, said CSC.
Like Exceed, this product was developed in collaboration with user groups and advisory councils, the company said. It is fully integrated with CSCs bodily injury claims evaluation, business intelligence and document/image management tools.
An initial license for POINT IN costs between $100,000 and $300,000, said the spokesperson, "but it could be less or more."
Further information on both products is available at www.csc.com.
IDP announced the Acies/one policy processing module, the first component in the rollout of a more extensive property-casualty insurance package.
Utilizing "table-driven processing," Acies/one can process any line of p-c business, "making it a truly universal rating engine," stated Wyncote, Penn.-based IDP. Carriers that process multiple lines will not need separate modules for rating auto, BOP, dwelling fire and workers compensation. External interfacing technologies, such as XML, allow this new module to integrate into existing systems, the company added.
Policy processing screens can be Web-based, desktop-based, or both, said IDP. "Some people prefer the richness of the desktop [graphical user interface] versus a browser-based product," observed Gary Gilbert, IDP president and CEO. "Acies/ones n-tier design allows users to satisfy both preferences Clients can link their own Web front ends to the product as well."
For each computing process, systems will require some number of tiers (number of servers, layers of processing). An n-tier system allows for virtually any number of such layers for different situations, as needed.
In addition, said IDP, the product provides out-of-sequence processing, automatic renewals, easy modification of system parameters without programming assistance, and electronic or hard-copy forms distribution.
The full Acies/one rollout, including the launch of billing, claims, reinsurance and total management reporting modules, is expected to be complete by this fall, said IDP.
According to an IDP spokesperson, estimated total cost of ownership for a countrywide implementation of Acies/one after initial installation and licensing is approximately 2 to 3 percent of a companys direct written premium. Further details are available at www.idpnet.com.
Taliant Software, LLP debuted its PowerComp J2EE p-c insurance softwarebased on the companys previous workers compensation productwhich it said will be available in the first quarter of 2004.
According to James Haley, chief marketing officer of Denver-based Taliant, the new product is "an entire integrated suite," based on the J2EE platform, that includes rating, quoting, endorsing, issuance, billing, financials and claims management.
J2EE is the acronym for Sun Microsystems Java 2 Platform-Enterprise Edition, which competes directly with Microsofts .NET platform. Mr. Haley said Taliant chose J2EE because it is a "database independent" technology.
Taliant said its current softwareproviding integrated work management, "customer-centric" processing tools, forms and document production, billing, and a note pad tool"will be embellished and improved in the J2EE version, as will the administration suite used to manage much of our component-based architecture."
The company added that the new product will "support virtually unlimited interface capabilities, including those required to communicate with legacy mainframe systems. It will operate in an n-tier environment and support "any industry-accepted Web server."
License fees for the full product will vary between $200,000 and $1.2 million, said Mr. Haley. Those opting for the policy module only will pay about half that amount. There is also a maintenance fee (18 percent of the license fee), but the fees can be bundled into a five-year lease agreement, he added.
Further information is available at www.taliantsoftware.com.
Reproduced from National Underwriter Edition, June 16, 2003. Copyright 2003 by The National Underwriter Company in the serial publication. All rights reserved. Copyright in this article as an independent work may be held by the author.
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