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Choosing Experience

Underwriters, having traditionally been poorly served in the technology arena, were the initial driver for the development of an innovative new underwriting management information system from IT solutions providers, TriSystems. Called Experience, it transforms the lengthy process of analysing underwriting experience data, eliminating the need to wade through mountains of paper to obtain key information. One of the first purchasers of the system has been Janson Green, now Limit Underwriting Limited, the largest provider of corporate capital to the Lloyds market.

Their scenario is probably familiar to anyone in the underwriting business. Christopher Smith, underwriting systems manager at Janson Green explains, "Like most companies, we already had an underwriting statistics database that was originally developed at the beginning of the 1990s. At the time, with nothing available out there to simply buy-in, we were very happy with it, despite the reams of paper needed to run it."

As developments proceeded during the decade on Janson Green's main systems, it soon became noticeable that the underwriting statistics system was becoming quite outdated and inflexible. "TriSystems, our IT consultants, had developed and enhanced the reporting tools over time but, being paper-based, the system was not going to be able to deliver the information straight to the desktop without major surgery. Many of the day-to-day jobs, such as aggregating figures, printing graphs, downloading triangles to Excel, monitoring written premium targets or making estimated projections, could not be carried out by the system so they had to be performed by hand using spreadsheets, re-keying the data from the printed reports. To change the system to get it perform those types of functions would have been to costly and time consuming for us to do", explains Christopher Smith.

This is where TriSystems's Experience came in.

Explains Jeff Ward, director TriSystems, "The majority of companies have had some sort of statistics database for many years, but there was nothing available that added value to these systems by taking their data and delivering it directly in an underwriter-friendly form for detailed analysis. There were plenty of management accounting tools around but nothing that could easily perform the type of work that insurance professionals actually wanted - such as reporting through triangulations and development graphs with some associated statistics functionality".

Using their underwriting and statistics knowledge gained through their work with a range of underwriters in the Companies and Lloyds markets, TriSystems developed a PC package that would integrate into any underwriting statistics database, using a variety of state-of-the-art graphical and tabular analysis tools.

Comments Christopher Smith, "As a long-standing client of TriSystems, we were given the opportunity in March of this year to try out this new software product. Although our active underwriter and director, Barnabas Hurst-Bannister, was in favour of the system from the outset, he wanted to make sure that all of our underwriters were happy with it before going ahead." Consequently, Janson Green decided to implement a pilot study with six of their key underwriters and their assistants, which would last three months.

The members of the pilot study were keen to ensure the system's ease and speed of use. It was not just the need to help the underwriters make the most of the data they were working with, but Experience would also need to help relive them of the more repetitive and time-consuming tasks such as target tracking and monitoring. Also, although their underwriting team is computer-literate, Janson Green did not want bring in a piece of software whose use would mandate a lot of technical training.

This August, after evaluating the system and establishing its ability to work with their existing database, the underwriters at Janson Green agreed that they would like Experience rolled out to the whole team, about 30 users in all.

Comments Christopher Smith, "We are delighted with Experience. It is both functionally rich and powerful enough to satisfy the varied demands of a wide range of users, from the underwriters and their assistants, to the staticians."

Janson Green believe that their investment has really added value to their existing database. "Additional functionality has been brought without depreciating any prior investment that has been made in the database over the past decade", says Christopher Smith. They now have a system that can generate multi-currency development triangles with gross, reinsurance and net views, colour graph printing, plug-in statistical projection modules such as craighead curves and Chain-ladder, budget versus actual comparisons, document sharing and the ability to cut and paste graphs into their office desktop suite.

The software's biggest selling point however, was the time it could save. "Up until this time, to simply produce reinsurance adjustments or a presentation could take days", comments Christopher Smith. "With Experience these jobs now take minutes as time does not need to be wasted in waiting for the arrival of the data and then re-typing the figures and coding the spreadsheet arithmetic. Also, you only need to do things once, as reports and graphs can be automatically refreshed and reprinted on demand."

"The impact that Experience has had on our business area is significant. Rather than having to translate the business user's ideas via the IT team, they can apply them immediately and directly into the database via Experience and see the results appear first-hand. This allows us to analyse our business in a more meaningful manner and be much more flexible and dynamic in our approach. Our ultimate goal is to have the best-informed underwriting team in the London Market. The investment in Experience is a major step towards that goal", concludes Christopher Smith.

-   Computing for Insurance