Car Insurance

FINEOS Corporation, a leading innovator of banking and insurance software, has just announced the general release of FINEOS 4.0(TM), its line-of-business software suite of front and back office solutions designed to optimise the sales, servicing and product management processes of financial services organisations.

FINEOS 4.0 arranges the company’s complete product portfolio into six industry-specific pre-packaged solutions that have enhanced functionality in customer, case, contract and work management. The six solutions include FINEOS Life, FINEOS Pensions, FINEOS Insure, FINEOS Banking, FINEOS Lending and, specially packaged for the North American insurance industry, FINEOS Employee Benefits. Each vertical solution area will be rolled out in a phased approach over the coming months.

With FINEOS 4.0, each line-of-business area is divided into separate Front Office and Back Office component software suites that can be deployed individually (e.g. FINEOS Life Front Office), or combined together as a complete enterprise-wide solution.

FINEOS Front Office(TM) is the FINEOS suite of highly integrated application modules and internet portals that deliver enterprise-wide customer relationship management (CRM) and straight through processing (STP). Version 4.0 enhancements in Front Office functionality provides for greater workflow automation, process engineering, and case management, addressing the following key functional areas:

– 360-degree sales lead management, distribution and follow-up

– Complete support for renewals and new business for group and

individual business

– Automated underwriting decision-making

Vulnerable consumers are being coerced into signing up for high-cost, unaffordable loans.

For 61-year-old Yasmeen El, of Philadelphia, it started with an envelope arriving in the mail. Inside was an unsolicited “live check” for $4,000 from Household Finance (HFC). El was in luck - or so she thought - when HFC, the nation’s oldest consumer finance company, came knocking. She needed money to repair her roof in that spring of 2000, and the check had arrived just in time.

What she didn’t know was that she was a prime candidate for predatory lending.

“Four days after I deposited the check, I got a call from the local office; they needed me to come in to their office and sign some additional papers,” she says.

While she was there, the loan officer convinced her that she needed credit insurance, El says. She was assured the cost would be only $160.80, for 60 months coverage, so she figured she could pay it out of the $4,000 she had borrowed.

“Oh, no, no, there is a way for us to do it and include it in the loan,” El remembers the loan officer saying. “So he goes and gets the paperwork and I sign additional papers.”

Specialty personal lines proves profitable for young insurer

Famity tradition has been portrayed through the years in a number of art forms, including television series about people with the last names of Walton, Huxtable and Wilder. Family tradition is as important in today’s society as ever. It is championed in rock and roll via the current “Family Values Tour,” and among sports teams that adopt the We Are Family song made popular by Sister Sledge. Sports teams and rock stars, after all, strive for the kind of togetherness that is present in a family unit.

The family unit is alive and well Just ask Mike McGraw, president and CEO of Pacific Specialty Insurance Company, how important the traditional nuclear family unit is. He’ll tell you it is thriving. McGraw’s father was a self-made entrepreneur and successful businessman who left a top-level position at age 46 to start what was then the McGraw Group, but later evolved into Pacific Specialty Insurance Company (PSIC).

Based in Menlo Park, California, a southern west bay suburb of San Francisco, McGraw Group moved to this location in 1989. It also has a Southern California satellite office that houses about 80 employees located in Anaheim, California.

The number of possible markets to access trucking is declining faster than Martha “it’s not a good thing” Stewart stock is declining in value. It has been that way for some time. Joe Hutlemyer, president of Seaboard Underwriters says: “The number of markets writing transportation business has declined from roughly 125 six years ago to about a dozen presently. We are not seeing many new entrants, and the pricing continues to increase at a 15% to 20% pace.” Hutlemyer also states that reinsurance terms remain strict.

Robert Fiore, senior executive underwriter at Hartford’s transportation business unit, says that “while we’ve seen the liability market for truckers harden from $2,500 per power unit to the present $4,500, there are a few major carriers that continue to hold pricing down.” Fiore doesn’t believe that this will continue after the July 1 reinsurance treaties renew. “I think that we will see liability pricing of $6,000 per power unit for $1 million CSL by year-end 2002.”

Some believe that the pricing will slow. Slow probably means a less than 10% increase. The fact that the trucking market is extremely small compared to just a few years ago contributes to the price increases. There are only so many carriers to access. That number could just as easily be reduced with the financial climate in today’s insurance arena.

Accelerating Application Problem Resolution is Part of a Paradigm Shift to Support Growing Online Business and International Operations

Identify(R) Software, the pioneer and leader in application problem resolution software, today announced that Norwich Union Insurance (Norwich, UK), the largest general insurer in the UK, is deploying Identify’s AppSight Black Box application problem resolution software as part of its strategy to transform its application support processes.

A division of Aviva Worldwide, Norwich Union Insurance insures one in five households, one in seven motor vehicles and more than 800,000 businesses in the UK. In 2003, Norwich Union helped 1.6 million UK customers get their lives back to normal following an incident.

Underlying and supporting Norwich Union’s significant transactional volumes is a complex network of business applications that must be operational, fault-free, and performing well to enable effective, profitable business performance. “We needed an efficient support infrastructure for our business-critical applications, which range from consumer-facing Web pages through to transactional and quoting engines,” explains Janet Randell, manager of tools and technology at Norwich Union Insurance. “We have thousands of users internally and 30 million externally, so a rapid response in isolating and resolving software problems is imperative for us. AppSight gives us insight into application execution so that we can assign and solve problems significantly faster.”
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AppSight uses patented AppSight Black Box software technology to monitor application execution and capture a synchronized, real-time log of user actions, system events, performance metrics, configuration data, and code execution flow–much like the “black box” flight recorder on an aircraft captures a real-time record of a flight. The AppSight Black Box log can be replayed and analyzed to quickly pinpoint the root cause of all kinds of application problems, whether related to performance, configuration issues, user mistakes, or code errors. Because AppSight allows IT professionals to simply replay, rather than recreate the problem, it eliminates up to 70 percent of the cycle time traditionally consumed by root cause analysis.

A growing trend in Norwich Union’s business is driving the company to transform its application support processes. The majority of Norwich Union sales are through broker channel accounts, but the growing preference of their personal lines customers is to deal with the company through Norwich Union Direct. This trend dramatically increases the application support challenge.

“The Internet eliminates the buffers of brokers or customer support personnel, so business functionality, as well as potential application problems could be exposed directly to our customers,” said Jim Sadler, director of technology and innovation at Norwich Union Insurance. “Identify’s AppSight Black Box technology is a core component of a new application monitoring initiative that shifts the fundamental focus from ‘fix it fast’ to ‘anticipate and avoid’ application problems.”

Norwich Union’s critical applications are a combination of packaged software and software developed in-house using mainly Microsoft technologies. The firm has now spent a full year training staff and testing and proving the software in development cycles, with a staggered rollout of the technology still underway. “From a development point of view, AppSight has proven itself a tremendously effective tool,” says Randell. “We will soon be deploying AppSight in production, and expect to achieve significantly improved diagnosis times. Nothing else could give us this kind of insight, particularly in view of the production codes that are commonly in use today.”

Norwich Union Insurance is due to incorporate AppSight into its standard support and development processes and Identify’s patented Black Box technology will be embedded in the company’s standard operating environment. “We are already finding that AppSight has provided significant business value,” continued Randell. “The total cost of ownership is low, with a quick time to market and the practical benefits being realized very rapidly. The scalability of the platform and the ease of integration were other plus points. As an enabler of increased productivity and lower costs, we have found Identify’s AppSight Black Box to stand out as a pioneering technology.”