Insurance Networking News: Executive Strategies for Technology Management articles from December 2004

Insurance Networking News: Executive Strategies for Technology Management archives from December 2004

The New Face Of CRM.(customer relationship management)
December 1, 2004... Along with "dot-com," another linguistic relic of the late 1990s is "CRM." The acronym is barely uttered anymore in polite business circles-at least not without knowing, sideways glances. That's because the promise of both the Internet and...

Insurers Study Their Training Options.
December 1, 2004... Career agents for Boston-based John Hancock Financial Services Inc. can be excused these days for thinking they're full-time students rather than full-time insurance professionals. Over this past year, John Hancock's 1,400 career agents...

Spitzer Probe Pushes For More Disclosure.(Eliot Spitzer)
December 1, 2004... The insurance industry was in shock after N.Y. Attorney General Eliot Spitzer dropped his bomb by filing a lawsuit in October against Marsh & McLennan. Spitzer charged the New York-based insurance brokerage firm-one of the largest in the...

Coming Clean.
December 1, 2004... Call me Pollyanna, or just dismiss me as a member of the "liberal" media, but in my humble opinion, the Spitzer probe into possible fraud and anti-competitive practices in insurance will ultimately be good for the industry. Yes, he's...

Insurance Distribution: The Hartford Takes New Exec's Selling Strategy To The Bank.(executives)(The Hartford Financial Services Group)
December 1, 2004... Many insurers would agree that financial services convergence-the integration of bank, brokerage and insurance products sold under one roof-has not matured to the degree many had hoped four years after the passage of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act....

Fireman's Revamping Its Underwriting Operations.(Fireman's Fund Insurance Co.)
December 1, 2004... When insurance underwriting cycles turn sour, as they inevitably do, industry experts are quick to criticize the industry for not following strict underwriting guidelines. The easiest solution for insurers to turn a "soft" market around is to...

E-mail Trail Points to Sloppy Governance.(Brief Article)
December 1, 2004... Much ado has been made about the role e-mail has played in N.Y. Attorney General Eliot Spitzer's investigations into fraud and anti-competitive practices in the financial services industry-most recently in his lawsuit against New York-based...

Product Previews.(product introduction)
December 1, 2004... PEGASYSTEMS RELEASES ENTERPRISE BPM SUITE Pegasystems Inc., a Cambridge, Mass.-based provider of rules-driven business process management (BPM) software, has released SmartBPM Suite, which includes PegaRULES Process Commander Version 4.2...

Web Services Picks Up Pace, But Adoption Issues Linger.
December 1, 2004... Each year, insurers identify the flexible, non-proprietary and enterprisewide benefits of Web services, although insurers continue to cite three prevailing reasons to table e-services investments for another day. These reasons include reliance...

Business Alliances.
December 1, 2004... WHITEHILL TECHNOLOGIES LANDS $4.1 MILLION INVESTMENT FROM GROWTHWORKS CANADIAN FUND Whitehill Technologies Inc., a Moncton, New Brunswick, Canada-based provider of document composition and data transformation software solutions, recently...

InBank Offers Insurers Private-Label Bank Products.(InBank Services LLC)
December 1, 2004... There are a handful of companies that offer insurance outsourcing services to banks, but InBank Services LLC is taking the opposite route-it hopes to supply insurers the means to offer private-label bank products. "If you look at the...

Contracts.(Brief Article)
December 1, 2004... The Contracts Update section includes announcements of contracts insurance information technology companies have signed with customers in recent weeks. Contract news can be faxed to Insurance Networking News magazine at (312) 913-1366 or by...

Calendar.(Calendar)
December 1, 2004... Disaster Planning/Business Continuity Sponsor: Risk and Insurance Management Society When: Dec. 2-3 Where: University Club, San Francisco www.rims.org CLE Seminar Sponsor: NAIC When: Dec. 3 Where: New Orleans...

Poor Oversight Rings Up Costs.(Brief Article)
December 1, 2004... The money that corporations spend on telecom services-such as local and long distance, mobile phone plans, calling cards, conference and data networks-has long been considered a cost of doing business. At a time when telecommunications...

No Mistake: An E&O Solution That Simplifies Policy Applications.(errors and omissions)
December 1, 2004... The Chubb Group of Cos. is making processing E&O insurance coverage easier for agents with an intuitive, customized Web-based solution that's proving to be a smart investment. Providers of errors and omissions (E&O) insurance coverage...

Genworth Financial's "Gridiron" Scores A Touchdown: To meet increasing actuarial processing needs, Genworth Financial Inc. linked 100 PCs into a grid architecture. The cost-saving strategy has improved cycle times and risk management.
December 1, 2004... Until recently, grid computing was the domain of high-performance computing sites that calculate petabytes of data for particle physics problems or modeled engineering simulations. Now, grid computing is going mainstream, opening up new...

INN Focus.(Genworth Financial Inc.)(Brief Article)
December 1, 2004... CASE STUDY: Genworth Financial Inc. AT ISSUE: The company wanted to shorten the cycle times for actuarial risk models, but not pay a high price to upgrade existing systems. THE SOLUTION: Genworth linked 100 of its desktop...

Insurers Learn to Focus on the "R" in CRM.(customer relationship management)
December 1, 2004... After several years' experience with customer relationship management (CRM) implementations, insurers are a lot smarter about what the term means and how to achieve it, according to industry experts. Perhaps one of the most important...

Insurers Study Their Training Options: More insurers are recognizing the advantages of e-learning to augment their efforts to train and educate agents and employees.
December 1, 2004... Career agents for Boston-based John Hancock Financial Services Inc. can be excused these days for thinking they're full-time students rather than full-time insurance professionals. Over this past year, John Hancock's 1,400 career agents...

Insurers Examine Role of Online Learning.
December 1, 2004... The incentive for insurers to explore online learning, beside the low travel costs and reduction of lost agent and employee productivity, is the fact that carriers can turn around training relatively quickly. This is essential with so many new...

Lessons Learned About E-Learning.(Brief Article)(Illustration)
December 1, 2004... Old Method New Method Training Time Business hours Off hours Training Type Classroom or Web Conferencing Web-based video-over-Web Training Costs High for classroom Lower...

CD-ROM Programs Still Spin with Carriers.
December 1, 2004... Despite an emerging trend toward robust, interactive e-learning tools and technologies, some insurance companies continue to reap results from tried-and-true applications that are basic yet effective. Eschewing the bells and whistles, South...

An Appraiser Search Engine Worth Its Weight In Gold: Fireman's Fund has developed a co-branded Web site that enables its agents to locate specialty appraisers for customers who insure high-worth assets with the provider.
December 1, 2004... Carriers that provide coverage for rare, valuable items understand that it's ill-advised to assign appraisers who specialize in fine art or jewelry to assess the valuation of an expensive item outside their realm of expertise. Selecting...

e.Business Briefs.
December 1, 2004... HEALTH INSURERS COMMIT TO ATM-LIKE INFRASTRUCTURE HealthTransaction Network Corp., Buffalo, N.Y., has received letters of intent from several health insurance and health care providers to develop a new nationwide health care transaction...

Reinsurance Hub Performance Leaps 300%: Using a service designed to reduce Internet latency, ri3k Ltd. dramatically improved the performance for distant users of its Web-based collaboration application.
December 1, 2004... As insurers "Web-enable" their core applications to provide agents, claims professionals, customer service representatives and customers access to data and transactional functions, poor Web site performance becomes more than an annoyance to end...

Index Of Advertisers.(Brief Article)(Illustration)
December 1, 2004... Advertiser Site Addresses Page # Canon www.usa.canon.com 40 CGI www.cgi.com 5 Esker ...

Web-Based Training Saves Time, Money: A convergence of business and technology trends provided the impetus for Web-based training.
December 1, 2004... Training is a critical initiative for most insurance companies. The ability to educate customers and partners about changing regulations and new legislation, as well as a company's products and services, is key to ensuring a long-term...