Alex Aminian, President and CEO, DAVID Corporation

Welcome back to our forum Alex. What separated the successes from the failures last year?

“Focus on improving the client experience at every stage of the insurance life cycle.”

Last year we saw insurance organizations continue to move away from the square peg-round hole philosophy. The lack of meta data standards coupled with the time and effort required to transform the data among different systems created more costly integration problems or outright integration failure. Another culprit was existing legacy systems, which could not be modernized through a new set of Web services, further exacerbating the integration challenges. In order to integrate these disparate systems, import and export tools had to be developed, which caused its own set of challenges. On the other hand, when insurers provided automation through a combination of a business rules engine and business process management, as well as a well-designed and published set of Web services, they were able to effectively automate hand offs in data transformation and integration.

Next steps?

Insurers are continually challenged with the demands placed on them by their constituencies to either respond to requests for data or provide other services on demand. Providing easy access to data throughout the insurance life cycle is critical to increasing client satisfaction and retention not to mention increasing an insurer’s profitability, internal staff productivity, and reducing the length of the claims cycle.

Exciting technologies?

Developing on-demand and virtual systems continue to be one of the most value-add services that insurance companies can offer. Beyond providing complete data access in real time, providing this level of access on mobile devices will have a tremendous impact on the way insurance companies operate.

Your message to insurance companies?

Focus on improving the client experience at every stage of the insurance life cycle. Virtualize your systems by providing on demand touch from anywhere, anytime. This will not only increase your responsiveness and client satisfaction but will also increase the accuracy of data during initial capture, reduce the amount of paper and hand offs, thus reducing the burden on internal staff and call centers.