Innovation Group's New Release Enhances Data Conversions

The Innovation Group, a provider of business process services and software solutions to the insurance industry, releases a new version of Insurer Conversion, the conversion component for the Innovation Insurer suite.

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

Many insurers view policy conversions as a high-risk endeavor based on past experience. However, successful policy data conversions are critical to both renewal and growth for insurance companies.

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

“The addition of data conversion functionality, building on Innovation Group's experience and expertise, 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, mitigate risk and realize the full value of new system implementations, policy migration projects as well as projects absorbing new data into the organization.”

Innovation Conversion leverages the Innovation Insurer enterprise data model as the central reference data model forstandardized data definitions, data formats, and data relationships to ensure data consistency. The data model is easily extendable to accommodate any unique data elements used within an insurer's business.

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

• Extract: Retrieval of data from legacy systems based on pre-agreed exclusion criteria with a fully reconcilable audit trail and set of reports.
• Map: Apply target validation and data mapping rules. Restructure the data into interface files, representing the groupings needed for the integrity stage and report results for audit.
• Integrity: Create tables being representations of target system. Enhance data passed into this stage to include all target information beyond the data provided at new business. Eliminate duplicate clients, addresses and phone numbers. Create a fully reconcilable audit trail and reports.
• Load: Create load files in a format ready for load to target tables using the representation provided by the integrity stage. Report results to the audit manager and final reports confirming the success of the conversion.
• Audit: Create all required counts, calculations and formulae required to confirm the success of the conversion whilst providing functionality to reconcile the figures and report both successes and failures at all stages of the process.