By Paul Allen

A decade of acquisitions has transformed Towergate Partnership into Europe’s largest independently owned insurance intermediary. That path to growth, however, has brought with it a medley of legacy technology, with Towergate Underwriting – the organization’s underwriting division – amassing some 30 different administration systems. As its data was all over the place, it could not get a clear view of how well the organization was actually doing. It was time to consolidate.

Towergate Underwriting turned to RDT’s Landscape.NET, a solution built on Microsoft SQL Server 2005 for its central database management system, Microsoft Visual Basic.NET 2003 for system integration and Windows Server 2003 for the operating system. One of the attractions with Microsoft, says Jon Mitchell, senior project manager at Towergate Underwriting, was that it already was a big consumer of all things Microsoft, “so our in-house expertise is aligned with that.”

Using Landscape.NET, Towergate can build a shell product that an underwriter can quickly and easily customize to a client’s needs, says Jon Mitchell.

According to Mitchell, the system’s architecture provided the requisite framework to achieve the primary business objective of consolidating all its platforms. “From a group management point of view, we’ve never had all our data in one place, and that makes it hard to see which businesses are performing well and which need a nudge, to see which channels to market are working and which aren’t,” Mitchell says. “One of the biggest benefits then will be to centralize that data so we can properly analyze it.”

Meanwhile, from an underwriting perspective, the firm’s focus is on creating custom-made products. Using Landscape.NET it can build a shell product that an underwriter can subsequently customize to a client’s needs, and do that quickly and easily, says Mitchell.

“With the .NET platform development is quick, it’s powerful, and you can leverage other products easily as well,” notes Mark Bates, managing director with RDT. “So we’ve integrated a number of other components like [Microsoft] PerformancePoint and MapPoint, for mapping property locations for example, into the solution.”

Another key component RDT has built that leverages the .NET environment is a rating engine. “It is Microsoft technology underneath, which gives us the programming environment, and it is built in such a way that it is intuitive for them [Towergate] to use,” says Bates. The engine enables customers such as Towergate to define their insurance products and adjust the pricing quickly in response to changes in the market, he explains.

In addition, .NET makes launching a major system change or integrating it via XML to another system for better straight-through processing relatively straightforward, says Mitchell. And given Towergate plans to grow by further acquisition, the system will enable a faster integration of those businesses.

Landscape’s .NET and SQL Server foundations also will help Towergate leverage electronic data interchange (EDI), pursue more of a Web strategy, and build new channels to market, says Mitchell.

For example, a longer-term goal, which will probably kick off in the third quarter, is to build a more integrated trading network, where brokers can place business with Towergate electronically. “To a company like Towergate that has an enormous number of its own brokers placing business with its own underwriters you want to make that process as efficient as possible,” Mitchell notes.

“Landscape becomes a repository for that, and can enable messaging back to the broker to provide documents, ask for further information or whatever else you like,” he explains. “Having a back-office system that can natively talk XML, and be easily developed to provide Web services means it puts the underwriting side in control, and the broker systems are the ones that have to write to our APIs. And it means from an underwriting point of view we can provide these sorts of integrated trading solutions really quickly.” To this end, the firm will work with one of its new acquisitions, Open GI, which provides systems to the insurance broker community.

As for the wider insurance industry, Towergate offers an interesting case study, according to Bruce McKee, insurance business development manager with Microsoft UK.

The majority of companies around the world still run on inflexible, legacy mainframe-type solutions that were initially designed as single product architectures. “You’ve effectively got a number of silos,” McKee says. The upshot is simple problems such as no single view of a customer, no ability to cross-sell and up-sell, and no ability when assessing a claim to link that back to a quote to see if it makes underwriting sense.

In addition, the accumulated legacy infrastructures may be stifling M&A activity, since potential merger targets often have incompatible systems that are too embedded in their businesses to rip one out and replace it with the other, suggested McKee. “So there are some real benefits if you can solve these sorts of issues,” he says.

www.towergate.co.uk

www.towergateunderwriting.co.uk

www.rdt.co.uk