Johannesburg, 23 Oct 2012
This growing demand for ever-decreasing disposable income has led to fierce competition between insurers. In their bid to gain a larger share of the market, progressive insurance companies have invested heavily in IT and rely on various technology-driven innovations to differentiate themselves.
As IT's transition from a support function to something that drives a firm's core competitive capabilities continues, CIOs in this sector are engaging in a wide variety of IT projects. As competition intensifies, insurers have to bring products to market in a timely manner and also ensure all data is captured in the processes involved.
"The most visible examples of IT innovation can be seen in how some insurers have gone about automating the process of underwriting insurance policies using sophisticated mobile applications for the company's agents and distributors," explains Richard Firth, CEO of MIP Holdings. "These allow them to respond to the customer's requirements in real-time without needing to visit an office, as all the information that they need is available to them at their fingertips. This is enabled through some unique applications on mobile and Internet platforms that allow the sales team to access information on products, targets, achievements, etc, at their convenience."
And MIP is providing insurers worldwide with these types of innovations to help their customers stay ahead of the competition. MIP's offering rests on the software it provides to help companies in the financial services industry collect contributions and pay benefits, including specific solutions for medical aid administrators, pension fund administrators, funeral fund administrators, life insurance administrators, unit trust administrators, lending or micro-finance administrators, asset finance administrators, treasury and motorcar maintenance and warranty administrators. MIP systems currently administer 8 500 000 lives on its applications.
Firth explains that vendors and end-users in the insurance industry worldwide do not talk the same business language. "The terminology used varies, so where one company's system requires a 'last name', another's requires a 'surname'. For this reason, we decided to adopt the ACORD standard, which will ultimately help all of our clients simplify and standardise their procedures," he says.
ACORD is the worldwide standard that delivers a common integration standard so all parties in the insurance ecosystem can integrate and communicate with each other through a comprehensive range of services. By adopting the ACORD standards, MIP will enable the opening up of its systems securely to third party applications using an international industry XML message standard on any platform, any device, anywhere. By aligning to the ACORD standard through semantic data mapping, a common dictionary is established.
"The common model (or dictionary) is based on a donation from IBM's Insurance Application Architecture (IAA) and Deloitte and Touch'e's data model," Firth says. "It prescribes the adoption of an SOA architecture 'that supports loosely coupled services to enable business flexibility in an interoperable, technology-agnostic manner. SOA consists of a composite set of business-aligned services that support a flexible and dynamically reconfigurable end-to-end business processes realisation using interface-based service descriptions.'"
He adds that the three biggest technology trends in the industry currently - cloud, mobile devices and social media - can use the ACORD standard for exchanging information, and this is one of the reasons the company elected to adopt the criteria set by the association. As a company that has committed itself to staying one step ahead of the technology curve, MIP embarked on this process as early as 2010, attending the annual ACORD conferences normally scheduled internationally, with the adoption and delivery of the first ACORD-complaint certified service being started in June 2012, and delivered in September 2012.
"Our party enquiry that returns information on the person, organisation, address, communication and policy/contract details is currently being extended to smart mobile applications, with a targeted roll-out of our first commercial ACORD-compliant mobile application by December," says Firth. "The future shapes the present, and trends in technology are fast being adopted in the insurance industry. This requires the ability to implement cutting-edge application integration in an agile manner in order to bring the right products to market in the right way."
"After visiting and working with the MIP staff, there is no doubt about the commitment they have to building ACORD Certified applications. The introduction of this mobile app is one of the first that I know of, and further demonstrates the speed and efficiency gains possible using ACORD standards," says Alan Stitzer, ACORD Program Manager, Southern Africa.
Share