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London Market Insurance Software

It would be very nice to report that, fresh with new millennial spirit, we are now in the golden era of technology in the London Insurance Market, on the crest of a wave, the cutting edge, boldly going and all of that. But I can't. There's a logjam somewhere and that, being a software man, bothers me.

Just as it was last century, there are big "strategic" packages from suppliers such as Rebus (Lines, IRIS, Genius, Writasure), Intech (Open Box, Open Co.), Room (Subscribe 2000), Eurobase (Synergy, Synergy at Lloyds), Olympic (Visual Writer, InsuranceWorks, IMACS), Sherwood (Senator, Sceptre), PMSC (Re+, I+) and CSC (Sics/NT). These offer a wide variety of functions allowing administration of an entire (re)insurance operation from a single suite. But leading edge ? By no means all of them, but that hardly matters - policies, claims, EDI and reinsurance don't necessarily need leading-edge: they need flexibility, security, scalability and so on.

Then there are, of course, several areas in which software can be bolted-on to add functionalty and these tend to be closer to the leading-edge. Statistical analysis systems from EMB (ResQ) and TriSystems (Experience); Workflow/IDM systems, that take the pain out of document management from companies such as Filenet, OpenCo and Documentum; Artificial Intelligence and Expert Systems, that are mainly used in reinsurance recovery, such as those from ReClaim, Rebus (Elgar), Insurance Market Solutions (Excelsior).

So what does the 21st century Insurance system need to offer to gain some advantage over the others? Web-enablement perhaps? Web-enabled software promises much: pain-free rollout, remote access, central administration and so on. A number of the major suppliers are moving that way, or will do shortly, (Room, Intech, Eurobase and CSC) and operations such as Terra Nova/Octavian, Catex and Enterprise are all working on various e-commerce facilities.

But you don't necessarily need a web-enabled package to achieve the benefits. One of my TPA clients in the USA, for example, has a regular claims management system rolled out to 80 of its customers using Citrix metaframe technology, all on the web. It was a million dollars cheaper than buying an untried, bleeding-edge web-enabled system and it works just fine. We've just bolted our underwriting/claims statistics product, Experience onto it and 80 companies can now get on-line access to stats reports, triangles, development graphs and so on, with not a single argument about HTML, XML or Java to confuse things. This approach may not suit everyone but if you've got a good "heritage" system working at the moment, avoiding spending hundreds of thousands replacing it just to get a thin front-end, never mind the risk to the business, has to have some merit.

And what of the Internet itself? Almost every type of business outside of the London Market, including their consumer-facing General insurance cousins, are chasing the e-commerce rainbow and there are a number of business models that seem to be working well. Is there an opportunity in the parochial London Market for e-commerce? Now that would need some serious new systems, not just web-enablement of the existing ones. But who's going to take the plunge and propose the new business practices that the software houses can then develop systems to support? And there's the logjam. The market's greatest asset, the subscription model, is also its greatest handicap: to achieve a consensus view on substantial change between hundereds of separate organisations, who have essentially been trading in the same way since the concept of insurance was invented, is a mammoth task. Until that's been tackled, the on-line world will never do more than add a small improvement in communications efficiency.

So, over to you, underwriters, brokers, risk managers and TPAs: decide how you want to trade in the 21st century please - demand usually creates supply.

By Jeff Ward, Director of TriSystems Limited

-   Lloyds List