SAP announces financial services policy management for mySAP Insurance

SAP AG recently announced the international development of financial services policy management (FS-PM) capabilities as part of the core functionality of mySAP Insurance. The new capabilities will be available for life insurance policies in Germany, Austria and Switzerland at the end of 2003, with capabilities for other lines of insurance as well as distribution in other countries including SA to follow.

The capabilities are being developed as a joint effort between SAP and the Germany-based IT consulting and system integration company msg systems AG.

Says Lloyd Chisholm, general manager for financial services at SAP Africa: "The local Insurance industry is currently facing a need to replace legacy systems. The question is do they need to re-develop and create a new wave of legacy systems, or do they embrace world-class solution capabilities in this area? At present South African Insurance companies can benefit from mySAP Insurance - customer relationship management (CRM), commissions and claims management capabilities, all of which are compliant with the Insurance Application Architecture (IAA) and Web service principals.

"SAP Africa look forward to building on its proven track record with regards to enterprise management and Human Capital Management (HCM) capabilities already implemented in most local major financial institutions, as well as introducing new functionalities of mySAP Insurance to these organisations," says Chisholm.

FS-PM will work with all lines of insurance and will integrate with other mySAP Insurance capabilities such as claims, commissions, collections and disbursements, business partner and business warehouse - enabling mySAP Insurance to manage the entire administration of an insurance company's core business processes. This will enable insurers to gradually replace existing systems, improve underwriting capabilities, reduce expenses, and explore cross-selling opportunities.

"With policy management, SAP is adding a central building block to mySAP Insurance that, in addition to the administration of insurance contracts, gives insurance companies the ability to re-use existing product components and quickly roll-out new products. For msg systems, the development of the solution is an important milestone in our successful alliance with SAP," said Hans Zehetmaier, CEO of msg systems.

mySAP Insurance uses a "product-driven" approach that allows insurers to build insurance products with components that can be re-used in combination with new elements to quickly create new offerings. The ability to re-use and re-combine components improves time-to-market, reduces costs and labour associated with development as well as maintenance. FS-PM supports open standards and the ability to integrate seamlessly into existing customer system landscapes, ensuring the highest standards in terms of reliability and processing capabilities with a corresponding decrease in redundant manual processing and associated errors.

The software is multi-language and multi-currency enabled, and SAP will provide international support through its global services network. With the addition of policy management, SAP will be the first software provider that offers an end-to-end solution - the first solution that enables straight-through processing.

"The development of this policy-management capability is yet another important part of the holistic, integrated SAP solution for the insurance industry," says Peter J Kirschbauer, senior vice president of Service Industries, SAP AG. "SAP's experience serving the world's leading insurance companies and the longstanding expertise of our partner msg systems provide a solid foundation for insurance companies looking to optimise their business processes."