Insurance Networking News: Executive Strategies for Technology Management articles from July 2007

Insurance Networking News: Executive Strategies for Technology Management archives from July 2007

Keeping Agents Honest-Legally and Ethically.
July 1, 2007... A former insurance agent from Penn Valley, Calif., was convicted of one felony count of insurance fraud and three misdemeanor counts of petty theft for collecting insurance premiums from clients for commercial general liability and commercial...

Underwriting: Insurance Credit Scoring Now Spawns Less Anger.
July 1, 2007... Roughly a decade after insurance carriers began adding customers' credit scores to the stew of statistics used to set premiums for auto and homeowner's coverage, negative reaction and feedback appears to be waning. Opponents still contend...

Document Management: Outsourcing Can Rescue Document Management.
July 1, 2007... In 2006, Auto Club Group (ACG) found that its document composition capabilities were highly inflexible and, faced with a legacy environment, it could not manipulate its print stream-at least without contracting additional workers. The...

Who Will Do The Job?(information technology management of insurance industry)(Discussion)
July 1, 2007... In the world of programming, what does the future hold? This was one of the questions a panel of industry experts at the IASA 2007 Educational Conference and Business Show pondered during the IT Town Hall meeting session. The future doesn't...

Identity Theft Coverage Gives Carriers the Edge: With help from third-party services, carriers are offering fraud coverage that includes restoration of stolen identities.
July 1, 2007... Identity theft, long the bane of IT departments, is also providing insurance companies with opportunities to offer a new kind of coverage and score some marketing points at the same time. Carriers are hiring third-party services to restore...

News Briefs.
July 1, 2007... BANKS SHOULD SET SIGHTS ON RELATIONS To entice customers to buy more financial products and services, financial services companies need to focus on improving their relationship strategies, according to Gartner Inc., a research firm...

Solutions.
July 1, 2007... ISTREAM TO INCLUDE NEW FUNCTIONALITY Whitehill Technologies Inc., Moncton, New Brunswick, announced new functionality in the IStream document automation suite, including IStream Publisher and IStream Document Manager. The IStream suite is...

News Briefs.
July 1, 2007... ANTI-TRUST MOVEMENT STALLS A movement in Congress to overturn the McCarran-Ferguson Act appears to be stalled in committee, at least at press time. McCarran-Ferguson exempts insurance companies from some antitrust rules, and leaves...

Correction.(Correction notice)
July 1, 2007... In "Outsourcing to the 'Rescue' For Growing Reinsurer" (May 2007), the outsourcing steps described were taken only by the Commercial Insurance Division of Swiss Re, not by the entire company. In the same article, the name of the company...

Solutions.
July 1, 2007... HIPAA TRANSACTION MANAGEMENT SOFTWARE SUITE Emerging Health Information Technology, a Yonkers, N.Y. provider of healthcare professional services and IT-based solutions, announced the availability of a new suite of HIPAA transaction...

Achieving 'Product in a Day': Think of a product one day and sell it the next? Software can help insurers move closer to the elusive goal of cutting 'time to market' to almost nil.
July 1, 2007... Insurance carriers need product development flexibility and "speed to market" to maintain competitive advantage. To help accomplish those goals, INN asked Doug Roller, CEO of Bolivar, Mo.-headquartered Duck Creek Technologies Inc., to describe...

Types of Agent Misconduct.(insurance industry)
July 1, 2007... There are many types of agent misconduct: * Theft of premiums. An agent takes the premiums received from customers. The agent can then pay out any claims that arise from his own pocket or never pay out on claims at all. * Unlicensed...

Mixing SOA and Batch Apps: Despite what most IT executives think, service-oriented architecture can fit with batch processes. Just beware of delays.
July 1, 2007... Most it executives never think of service-oriented architecture (SOA) as applying to batch applications. How could they possibly fit? But SOA is about reuse. And a business function used in online transactions may be the same business...

Tying Risk to Geography Can Help Limit Exposure: Pinpointing the latitude and longitude of an address helps Homesite understand risk, improve CRM and speed up processes.
July 1, 2007... The founders of Boston-based Homesite Insurance Group came together nearly a decade ago to create a progressive homeowners insurance company. In the quest to make their dream real, they got some help from software that links risk to geography....

Solutions.
July 1, 2007... ENTERPRISEWIDE ACCESS TO UNDERWRITING TOOLS Toronto-based Tritech Financial Systems Inc. enhanced it's General Insurance Management System (DIMS) offering to integrate with third-party providers of MVRs, auto & property claims histories,...

Choosing the Best Outsourcer.
July 1, 2007... To get the most out of an outsourcing relationship, insurers should choose only those pieces of the entire document management process best left to others. Boston-based Celent LLC divides document management into document creation and...

Insurance-to-Value Tools Help Keep Policies Real: Improved communications between claims and underwriting is a win-win for the carrier and policyholder.
July 1, 2007... An accident or catastrophe brings the moment of truth between a carrier and a policyholder. All too often, it's the only interaction between the two parties. The result is a relationship vulnerable to unwanted surprises. For example, a...

News Briefs.
July 1, 2007... THUNDERHEAD, WOLTERS KLUWER PARTNER ON NEW ENTERPRISE OFFERING Thunderhead, a UK-based provider of enterprise communications software, will offer Wolters Kluwer Financial Services' pre-configured, pre-approved state insurance forms as an...

Solutions.
July 1, 2007... RISK DATA SUITE AVAILABLE FOR WEATHER, DISASTERS Thanks to a partnership with WSI, an Andover, Mass., provider of weather-driven business solutions, Pitney Bowes MapInfo, Stamford, Conn., now offers complete access to weather and...

BPM Projects Progressing.
July 1, 2007... The insurance industry hopes to break even or record a profit within 12 months of business process management (BPM) implementation, according to a recent survey. The survey examined and benchmarked the level of success achieved by a variety of...

Who's Buying What: Recent deals for technology software and services.
July 1, 2007... XL GLOBAL TO USE INTERCEPT TO MANAGE PROCESSES Stamford, Conn.-based XL Global Services Inc., a part of the XL Capital Ltd. group of companies, will use Intercept Studio, a flagship product from Baltimore-based AVIcode, to manage business...

INN July 2007 Editorial Index.
July 1, 2007... Company Name Page # ACORD 14 Auto Club Group 28 Allstate 12, 21 American Insurance Association 12 American National Property and Casualty Co. 6 Amica Mutual Insurance 6 AMS Services 10 Applied...

Avoid Conversion Worries: With proper time and resources, converting a book of business to a new system holds less risk than previously thought.
July 1, 2007... Converting a book of business to a new system can be viewed by some as the riskiest part of a new system implementation. However, with proper time and resources, conversions need not be feared. They are all part of the system migration, which...