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Articles from
April 2007
Insurers: Achieving a Single View of the Customer |
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 Insurance companies are realizing that technology is at the heart of
efforts to better compete in the marketplace. To get a clear real-time
view of each customer while cutting costs, many firms have focused on
integrating all their systems and adopting and implementing a
consistent data standard.
To this end, the Insurance Value Chain family
of independent software vendors and systems integrators is starting to
prove itself a strong enabler. But how well have insurers actually
fared in 2006? We asked industry experts for their take on progress and
crucial next steps.
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Freedom of Choice: The Realities of Mainframe Modernization in 2007 |
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 What do Richie Havens and Devo have to do with mainframe migration? No, it’s not a stretch.
Havens will be forever remembered for his opening-act performance of the song “Freedom” at the Woodstock music festival in 1969, the “coming out” party of the rock ‘n roll gener-ation. And “Freedom of Choice” was the third album by New Wave musicians Devo, released in 1980, which contains their most well known song, “Whip It.”
During the late 60s and into the 80s, hundreds of financial industry firms bought and have since relied on mainframe computers main-tained now by a graying workforce, some of whom probably were among the tens of thousands on the grass at Woodstock or, in the 80s, danced indoors to Devo’s tunes.
Today, Richie Havens still performs. Devo? It’s rumored they’ve recorded a new version of “Whip It” for a Swifter TV commercial, which they’ve said they regret. Just like so many main- frame owners who wished they had moved away from their mainframes years ago.
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Breaking New Ground in Mobility and Elsewhere |
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 From the Editor:
Two years ago, at the ACORD/LOMA Conference held in Las Vegas, Gartner Group research director Kimberly Harris told an audience: “We hear the insurance industry is behind, but I don’t think you are. Yes, you have legacy systems to maintain that hamper you from moving forward, but with Web services and ACORD XML Standards, most industries can’t hold a candle to you.”
Today, to those comments we should add mobile technology. With its workforce that is more mobile by design than in other areas of the financial services industry, the manner in which the insurance industry has embraced mobile technology has been truly cutting edge. Whereas in other sectors mobile technology is prevalent for communicating, in insurance it is in use for working. It’s being employed to streamline the workflow process, and not only on a test basis.
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People on the Move |
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Fifth Third Bank Exec Heads Microsoft
Financial Services
Architecture StrategyInsurity Names
Markland as Chief Technology ArchitectFormer Microsoft Exec Becomes Infusion COORasch and Drescher Join Microsoft EMEA Financial Services TeamWoodruff’s Boulder Move in Institutional ResearchFormer AMEX
President Joins Gain Capital’s Board
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News Briefs |
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- Chubb Links Claims Operations to Auto Body Shops
- Microsoft and Partners Launch MiFID Initiative
- CheckFree and Corillian, Together Again
- SunGard’s Latest Acquisition Spree
- Latest INDATA Version Includes Mobile and ASP Modules
- Research Note: MiFID, Reg NMS to Increase Dark Pools
- Goldman Sachs Offers Connotate to Global Investor Clients
- Spreadsheet Compliance is the New Black
- Metavante Duplicate Detection Hits Lightning Speed
- Survey: Data Silo Integration is Still Manual
- SAP-SWIFT Integration to be Available Mid-2007
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Farmers Mutual of Nebraska Empowers Its Mobile Workforce |
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 One year and an investment in technology have had a huge impact on how adjusters for Farmers Mutual of Nebraska process their claims. A year ago Farmers Mutual’s adjusters were largely working in a paper environment. They would go out to a claim site to inspect a loss, and prepare a handwritten estimate. If the loss was too severe to handwrite an estimate, they would prepare the scope notes of the damage and return to the office to complete the estimate using software located on their desktop PC.
Today, their adjusters are using convertible tablet PCs with a new tablet-based estimating solution from Symbility that allows them to perform the bulk of their work directly at the loss site.
The solution has proved so successful that 75 percent of their adjusters have actually asked that their desktops be removed from their offices.
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Windows in Financial Services Developer Awards |
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 Excellence in development involves an awareness of the latest technology and the initiative to adopt and deploy it. But it also involves the creativity and inventiveness to find new ways to integrate, extend and tailor advanced technologies to support the increasingly high-powered demands of today’s business environment.
The four projects described on these two pages embody all of these traits. These four projects demonstrate excellence in development that in turn is driving leadership for the firms they represent.
For these outstanding achievements, these projects are being recognized as the winners of the Windows in Financial Services Developer Awards. The awards will be handed out at Microsoft’s Fifth Annual Financial Services Developer Conference in New York on April 25-26. The details of how and why they earned this honor are all here.
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The Banking Integration Factory: Integrated Services Made Easy |
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  For banks that have long struggled with delivering multiple solutions across multiple channels, there’s some new help. Microsoft’s Banking Integration Factory is a set of best practices and standards that will help banks achieve consistency in integrating services and optimizing the various channels through which they reach customers.
“It’s about beginning to put together a lot of our thoughts toward software development as an industrialized process – that’s why the integration factory. It’s a broad initiative within Microsoft,” said Marley Gray, Microsoft banking industry technology strategist.
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Strange Bedfellows? |
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  Microsoft and Novell may not be natural partners, but some financial firms are already cheering their new pact.
Given the number of mergers and acquisitions in the financial services industry, most institutions have a heterogeneous infrastructure environment, complete with more than one operating system. If only the systems vendors collaborated to increase interoperability, that complexity and risk could be reduced. In November 2006, Microsoft and Novell forged a pact that just might make that dream a reality.
Some big name financial firms reacted quickly to the news. AIG, Deutsche Bank and Credit Suisse have already announced their intent to take advantage of the benefits of the interoperability agreement between Microsoft and Novell. Under three separate customer agreements, Microsoft will deliver to each company SUSE(R) Linux Enterprise subscription certificates, allowing these customers to take advantage of the Microsoft and Novell agreement.
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High-Performance Computing Meets Microsoft Excel |
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 Microsoft Office Excel 2007 has vastly expanded capabilities – over
one million rows by 16,384 columns – and its capacity to boost
individual productivity and calculation performance have already
received much acclaim. For large financial firms, there is an even
greater potential. Excel 2007 has evolved from a standalone desktop
application to one that can participate in a client/server world,
available to users within an enterprise as well as users outside the
enterprise in a scale-out scenario. What’s more, with the new
multi-threaded recalculation engine, which accelerates calculations and
takes advantage of parallel threads across multi-processor machines,
the power of high-performance computing is now accessible.
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The Financial Community Weighs In On Vista |
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  The launch of Microsoft Vista was a big moment in the software
giant’s evolution, especially since it coincided with the release of
Office 2007. The firm has invested $20 billion in developing Vista and
the new version of Office, in what has proved to be a major overhaul of
its key product lines. The question is, after several delays, was it
worth the wait?
“It is such an audacious rewrite,” said Daniel Chait, managing director
with Lab49, a consulting firm that specializes in building applications
for global financial institutions. “They [Microsoft] had the foresight
to see people might stop automatically upgrading unless they did
something that provided a lot more value. They did that, and I think
people are going to want to take advantage of it proactively.”
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SAP: Flexible and Ready for Change |
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 In an industry undergoing rapid transformation, the worldwide market leader in enterprise software has been reshaping its product offerings and adjusting its market focus to position it for the next generation of software. Last year the leader in CRM, ERP, and supply chain software caused a stir in the CRM market when it introduced CRM on Demand. SAP also joined with Microsoft in releasing Duet, a solution that increases efficiency for business users by utilizing a familiar Microsoft desktop tool to access enterprise level data and manage corporate processes. We asked SAP’s Jon Bobalik, Director of IBU Insurance (Americas), to discuss SAP product offerings in this evolving environment.
We have been watching the release of Duet, the joint SAP/ Microsoft product that brings together business productivity and enterprise application. How does Duet fit into SAP product offerings?
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Managing Multiple Prime Brokers |
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 The rise in hedge fund assets under management (AUM) from some about
$200 billion in 1997 to about $1.3 trillion early this year, and the
increasing complexity of the 10 or more different trading strategies
hedge funds use are placing ever higher demands on primes.
Primes, or prime brokers as they used to be called, are a special class
of financial services providers dedicated to helping hedge funds
capture alpha and keep their books straight. Various sources indicate
that about half of prime brokerage income, which now is perhaps more
than $6 billion annually, comes from lending securities to cover short
positions and a third come from brokerage. The rest is divided between
margin lending and service fees.
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BNP Paribas, Reuters and Vhayu Join Forces on a Vexing Fixed Income Problem |
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 The single most important ingredient for success in securities and derivatives underwriting, trading and investing is complete price data, which in terms of granularity, is called tick data. Perfection means being able to see every trade as it occurs, knowing whether that trade is an offer taken or a bid hit, and knowing how much volume was done with each trade as soon as it occurs. It also means keeping this tick data in an easily-accessed historical data base.
BNP Paribas, now one of the largest commercial banks in the Eurozone and the sixth largest bank in the world (in assets), knows this of course, but in the global fixed income markets, this is no simple feat.
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Consortium Supports Small Business Financial Management With Vista |
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 Timed to coincide with the Vista launch, a consortium of banks and financial services vendors has unveiled a set of products intended to be a one-stop shop for small business banking needs. The suite is being targeted both toward small businesses, as well as toward other banks that want to boost their services to the small business community.
The consortium is called the PASS (Payments as a Secure Service) Consortium, and is made up of CIT Group Inc., Chase Paymentech, Internet Commerce Corporation, BankServ, CashEdge, PayPal, and IP Commerce Inc., a software company enabling open payments services between businesses from whom the idea for the consortium and new product suite originated.
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Danversbank and ITI Plot a .NET Future |
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  Danversbank, of Danvers, Mass., a $1.1 billion financial services institution serving northeastern Massachusetts, and Information Technology Inc. (ITI), a unit of Fiserv, have collaborated on several projects in the past. The bank is a user of ITI’s Premierecom Internet banking solution and last year collaborated with the vendor to implement a merchant capture solution that allows customers to capture and deposit checks without leaving their place of business.
But Danversbank CIO Lisa Rose Mandel doesn’t dwell on what has been done in the past.
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Wachovia Reaches Out To Handhelds |
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 Although online banking keeps skyrocketing in popularity, access has been limited so far mostly to desktop and notebook PCs. To give users of smaller handheld devices a similar sort of Web experience, Wachovia Bank has now launched an initiative dubbed “On the Go Banking.”
Since its rollout last September, Wachovia’s new program has served up an average of 8,000 sessions per day to users of Windows Mobile and RIM devices. In peak periods, usage can soar much higher. During December, for example, holiday travelers and shoppers logged into Wachovia’s banking site for as many as 12,000 sessions daily.
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Kingsway General Insurance Clears Business Path with CRM |
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 Insurance claims processing is a skein-like business: At Kingsway
General Insurance Co. in Toronto there are not only a variety of
insurance policies and plans – for auto, transportation, health and
property & casualty to name a few – but there is also a heightened
view of customer service that has spurred Kingsway to handle its
customers’ business the way customers want, which can be legion.
Kingsway needed to more easily identify the relationships between its
customers, as well as to ensure they received timely service tailored
to the way they expect to do business. To do this manually is virtually
impossible, but the insurance company’s past solution wasn’t working
optimally either.
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Insurer's Outlook-Based Document Management Supports Virtual Teams |
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 In a virtual age, when much business is conducted via email and other electronic means, document management takes on a new form. Integro Insurance Brokers knows about shifting paradigms. It was founded in 2005 to respond to consolidation in the insurance brokerage industry that had left the major risk market underserved.
So when the company was looking for an information management system it wanted one that would understand a company like Integro that serves clients with virtual teams of experts who may be dispersed all over the world.
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AEGON Improves Collaboration, Data Access and Customer Service with Web-Based System |
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 AEGON Group, a Netherlands-based global purveyor of life insurance and retirement planning (annual revenue: $57 billion), needed a way for its 30,000 financial advisors to share information instantaneously and inexpensively. The firm’s old suite of desktop tools was just no longer adequate for identifying and servicing the myriad estate-planning and wealth-distribution requirements of a growing client base of baby boomers.
“We needed to update the technology platform to a Web-based application,” recalled Bruce A. Tannahill, vice president of business and estate planning for Western Reserve Life Assurance Co. of Ohio, an AEGON subsidiary.
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Windows Open Where There Never Was a Sunrise |
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 Neil Betteridge, Whitehill Technologies’ vice president of marketing and product management, recalls when the mantra in the insurance industry was mainframe, mainframe, mainframe. But in the past few years he has seen a change afoot.
“Where we used to hear it needs to run on the mainframe, we are now hearing Windows or the mainframe,” Betteridge said, adding that the shift “has been brewing over the past couple of years.”
Betteridge said he has seen a large jump in the number of Windows servers in use in insurance companies and attributes this rise to several factors.
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