IBM announced two new advances in the insurance industry--a solution for improving operational efficiency and a framework for process acceleration--that are designed to help insurance carriers lower costs and increase customer satisfaction by handling core processes, such as claims and policy processing, more efficiently.
IBM's new Insurance Operations of the Future (IOF) solution is powered by a service-oriented architecture (SOA) built on IBM software. The IOF Solution recognizes inbound work tasks, including those coming from unstructured sources such as paper mail, voicemail, e-mail, and the Web. The solution can extract the relevant information, enrich it, and route the work task to an automated process, a clerical process, or a specialist process path.
The foundation of IOF is the new IBM Insurance Process Acceleration (IPA) Framework, which includes elements from IBM's WebSphere, Information Management, Lotus, Rational and Tivoli portfolios. The framework provides the SOA infrastructure required to enable solutions like IOF target processes like claims management, policy administration, underwriting, new business processing, and self-service inquiry and payment.
Based on open standards, IBM's framework strategy enables clients to take advantage of their existing capabilities along with new packaged software applications and customized capabilities. IBM's independent software vendor system also enables software providers to participate in the framework, giving insurance providers flexibility in choosing the business applications they need to address specific business processes and challenges.
"Insurance companies are still very dependent on paper documents and other forms of unstructured data to support basic processes such as contact center inquiries, policy processing, claims payments, underwriting and other service requests," says Mark Lewis, general manager, global insurance industry for IBM. "The IOF Solution allows insurance companies to dramatically cut costs and better respond to the growing needs of customers, agents and regulators while the IPA Framework provides an agile base for future insurance applications and solutions. These advances provide a glimpse of what the future of the insurance industry will look like."
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